Lolli & Grace Free Autumn Leaf SAL

Lolli & Grace Autumn Leaf SAL, Free Pattern

Although the four day SAL, ran on Instagram with instructions on the Lolli & Grace website, is now over, the pattern and videos are still available for free:

Lolli & Grace Autumn Leaf SAL: Supply List
Day One (Set Up, Stitch Guide, 1st Video for Branches and Berries)
Day Two (2nd Video: Rest of Wreath Elements)
Day Three (3rd Video: Autumn Leaf Needlepainting)
Day Four (4th Video: Stitching the Leaf Veins and Finishing the Hoop)

Last month, I tried a new type of Needlepainting for the first time, in the amazing FREE Lolli & Grace Autumn Leaf Stitch Along (SAL) on Instagram! Anne, @lolliandgrace, the designer of colourful, cheerful and absolutely charming hand embroidery designs (see her Etsy shop for more), very kindly and generously put together this beautiful design and showed us how to stitch it with incredibly helpful video tutorials.

To me, the technique of Needlepainting usually brings to mind the exquisite details of silk Long and Short Stitch embroidery, usually worked with a single strand of thread with natural and subtle shading. This is a casual, relaxed, much chunkier version of Needlepainting, using four strands of thread at a time and a variety of high contrast colours (my absolutely favourite part of this design are the touches of bright blue!).

And it is FUN 😊

Honestly, I was really nervous about trying the colour blending in the center Maple Leaf. But thanks to Anne's encouragement, it was easier than I thought it would be and now I'm eager to try more Needlepainting! It's stitchy magic - you start adding the darker colours, in this case my red and brown, then layer the medium tones and finally add the lighter tones as highlights. I learned to stagger my stitches between long and short, but you don't pack them together in the rigidly long-short-long-short pattern you see in stitch dictionaries. It's very much instinctual, and I only started to enjoy it when I let go of the idea of perfection and just added colours where I felt they would work.

This was a little difficult at first, since the colours are not the traditional close tone shading, but once I had sorted them in my mind (a little arbitrarily) into my dark, medium and light colours it was a lot easier. I thought of it as: a bit of dark, lots of medium and a little light. The bright blue (806), for example, I thought of as a highlight, even thought it's a medium colour shade.

I wanted it to look like that beautiful golden late Autumn honeyed sunlight was shining on my Maple Leaf, so I deliberately kept the left side darker and added the brighter yellows and oranges on the right. As Anne said, you can go back and add a few stitches if there's any blank areas or you need more colour. I tried to add a few small groupings of two or three stitches with the same colour here and there to break up the stripe-y look.

I also really enjoyed learning the Pearly Leaf Stitch for the bottom branch!

Here's a slideshow, from floss toss to finish:

I did make some small changes here and there. I was so excited to start that I began pulling my DMC floss right away, so I made some colour substitutions for the shades I didn't have, which you can see in the first photo in the slideshow. They are:

Light Green: 581 substituted with 907
Medium Green: 3346 substituted with 905
Maroon: 815 substituted with 498 (red)
Tan: 167 substituted with 436
Gold: 3852 substituted with 728
Dark Blue: 3750 substituted with 824

The two most unique colours, other than the striking 806 Blue, are the Plum (3834) and Berry (915) which I was going to substitute with 333 and 718, respectively. But when I started stitching I realized that the original colours were more Autumnal and unlike anything else in the DMC collection. Here they are in progress on the left wreath branch:

French Knots are my Stitchy Nemesis, so I'm very proud of these nice plump berries!

For the Maple Leaf, I used Satin Stitch for the stem, rather than Outline Stitch, and I left the small veins out because when I tried to add them in they broke up the colour blending too much, especially at the tips. I also used Outline Stitch for the long veins because, as klutzy as I am, I was sure I would catch the long stitches on something 😂

I also added some Straight Stiches to the middle of the Lazy Daisy leaves for extra colour, and a few extra French Knots (gasp!) to the branch on the right. I do have a few little puckers in the fabric, since the Maple Leaf is stitched so heavily, but I'm optimistic that they will come out during finishing. I'm not sure what I'm going to make with it, probably not a hoop. A friend suggested a tote bag, which might be nice. For now, it will happily join the others in my project drawer.

The Lolli & Grace SAL was a fabulous, fun experience and I'm so glad I decided to jump in! To see other finishes, search the #lolligraceautumnSAL on Instagram. Not only was it awesome to learn new stitchy techniques but this SAL was an excellent way to find other stitchers to follow! What I really loved about this SAL is that although every stitcher used the same pattern, every Maple Leaf turned out completely different and it was so interesting and inspiring seeing how other people chose to Needlepaint 🎨

Have you ever tried Needlepainting? Would you like to?

The Joys of Spontaneous Stitching!!!

Please click on any photo to view it larger

The Joyful Jester

Felt on Linen with Embellishments

Featuring Kreinik Threads (Bag O' Bits)

I have an exciting project to share today! At the end of June, I discovered that The San Francisco School of Needlework & Design (SFSNAD) was hosting a Stitch At Home Challenge, free to anyone who wanted to enter and open Internationally! If you missed this challenge, worry not, for they will be offering more in the future 😊

Each challenge has a theme, and the theme for this round was Burlesque. Admittedly, at first, I wasn't all that interested as Burlesque brings to mind dancing girls with feather fans at best. However, when I looked through the Inspiration blog, I realized that the SFSNAD interpretation was much broader. As the blog says, in part:

"This Stitch-at-Home Challenge is intended to pull out the whimsical, the subversive, and the exaggerated parts of ourselves and our world. Throughout time, people have been responding to experiences that bump up against their sensibilities, that provoke a feeling of ridiculousness, frustration, or celebration. How do we reframe, exaggerate, or explode these feelings? Where do we find outrageous joy?"

I don't know if it's outrageous or not, but personally I find a great joy in stitching, which far surpasses the simple act of pulling a threaded needle through fabric. It is relaxing, absorbing, fascinating and endlessly surprising, and I wanted to capture some of that happiness in my project 😄 I wanted something colourful and cheerful 🎨🌈!

This image of Harlequin statuettes from the blog caught my eye:

Curious, I did a bit of Googling, and I found these delightful Harlequin illustrations from the Italian Commedia Dell'Arte, which according to the Metropolitan Museum, was " a theatrical form characterized by improvised dialogue and a cast of colorful stock characters that emerged in northern Italy in the fifteenth century and rapidly gained popularity throughout Europe." I loved the exuberant feathered costumes!

Image 1 / Image 2

And those lead me to modern Venice Carnivale masks, which are bright and colourful:

Image 1 / Image 2 / Image 3 / Image 4

Naturally, I wanted to make a wearable mask of my own! Something extravagant, with peacock feathers and lots of glittery bits. But as it is too early here for Hallowe'en I couldn't find a basic domino mask to use as a base and I didn't think felt would be stiff enough. I have always loved the figure of a Jester, and the idea of a merry joker, and so I decided to echo the outlandish cheer of the Harlequin costumes in my Jester's Cap.

Every challenge participant received a Kreinik Bag O' Bits to use in their stitching, courtesy of Kreinik, and I was so excited to finally be able to try out their metallic braids! I have been fortunate enough to inherit some stash of their Blending Filaments from my Stitchy Guru Mother, and while I love the shine of those, they are very fragile and need to be combined with a "carrier thread", normally some strands of DMC floss.

My bag had a good mix of colours. Most were short strands and not useable for any amount of stitching but there was a wonderful variety of textures and it was a great introduction to the wide range of products Kreinik manufacturers. It has definitely piqued my interest! There were three short two-inch lengths of the prettiest silver holographic flat ribbon that shone so brightly, and I'm going to search for that thread!

I had a lot of Big Ideas, but in the end I found a simple outline pattern I liked, a heraldic Jester's Cap from the Mistholme Pictorial Dictionary of Heraldy (which is well worth a browse if you're interested in old crests and the way they were designed):

And then I just went to town! I pulled out my collection of felt, and my Magical Tin of Embellishments. What's really interesting is that as long as I can remember, my Stitchy Guru Mother has keep a wonderful box of trimmings which comes out only for really special projects - Hallowe'en costumes, Christmas ornaments, dresses for special events - and has all kinds of pretty trims, crystals, rhinestones and sequins. I was thrilled to discover that I've FINALLY accumulated enough pretties to have one of my own, a hexagonal Quality Street chocolate tin full to the brim with sparkle and glitter ❤💎✨

There was no real rhyme or reason to the design, it was truly Spontaneous Stitching! I printed off the line drawing and cut it into four pattern pieces - three horns and the band. Then I cut those pieces out of felt (green, pink, yellow and purple). Then I spent an incredibly happy sunlit afternoon absorbed in playing with sparklies, spreading my supplies out on my Grandma's kitchen table and playing with the crystals until I got a design I liked. I glued the acrylic rhinestones on with Aleene's Fabric Fusion Glue.

Here's a Before-and-After shot, which shows the difference the trim makes! The pieced pattern is on the left, embellished with glued-on rhinestones, Kreinik threads, sequins and sead beads, and the fully embellished Cap is on the right, with the black-and-silver braid, silver picot trim, ruched ribbon band and jingle bells added:

Everything except the rhinestones was hand-stitched on, using Invisible Thread (Coats Transparent). This is very fine, and is excellent for adding seed beads!

I knew I wanted to echo the diamonds of the traditional Harlequin costume, so on the right side I glued square rhinestones at an angle to create diamonds of pink, red and purple. I outlined these in a turquoise Kreinik braid (I think it's a #8 braid) and added large silver e-beads. The center section has a Trellis of Couched iridescent Kreinik ribbon with layered sequin filling and the left horn has rhinestone "Polka Dots", with scattered silver bugle beads and Stem Stitched Kreinik braid, in a pink/purple mix.

The trims I added took the most time to sew on, but they added a lot of impact:

The local quilt store was once a craft store and they have a very small stock of odds and ends. That is where I found this fabulous silver-and-black braid, which is actually meant for Plastic Canvas. I outlined all three of the horns of the hat in this thread, Couching it to follow the shape of the pattern. I love it, and to me it feels Harlequin-like 😊

The background fabric, the pretty peacock blue, is a linen I found there too!

The other four trims are silver braids made by Tahl. After some auditioning, I went with the one at the top left, a pretty picot braid with diamond-patterned edges. I Couched this around the bottom of the hat band, and then I filled each little picot with a silver-lined sparkly seed bead in an alternating pattern of turquoise, yellow and red. Although it's a very small detail, the beads catch the light wonderfully in real life!

Here's my attempt to capture the sparkle, in the sunshine:

My favourite part is probably the rainbow Ruched Ribbon at the top of the band:

It took me several tries and many stabbed fingers, but eventually I - more or less - got the trick of ruching the ribbon, which is multi-coloured double-sided satin by Offrey. I used a simple zig-zag design shown in the tutorial for a flower on Nikki, In Stitches.

To make sure my stitches didn't show, I used Invisible Thread, which made the process slow going. The stitches vanished against the variegated colours when the ruching was complete BUT I couldn't clearly see the stitches as I was making them, which made it difficult to keep them even. I ended up marking dots along the sides for spacing with a purple Disappearing Marker. I would suggest practicing on a plain colour ribbon with matching sewing thread first! It is a great technique I'd like to try again.

The three jingle bells are ones I've saved from the collars of the Lindt Easter Bunnies! They are so pretty, and I always hoped to find a use for them. They sound very nice when rung too 😁 The Bunnies have become a family tradition in recent years. The bells would look lovely on Christmas ornaments too - any excuse to buy more chocolate 🍫

When I was a little kid, my Stitchy Guru Mother created a marvelous distraction device called The Glue Box. It was a plastic container filled to the brim with construction paper, crayons, markers, stickers, glitter glue, pipe-cleaners, pom-poms, popsicle sticks, beads and other cool crafty stuff. Many were the hours I passed in a creative blur, making one genius - to my mind, I'm sure - artwork after another to proudly be given to relatives as gifts or displayed on the fridge until the next "masterpiece" was concocted.

There was spontaneity in it, and joy. Truly outrageous, overwhelming, all-encompassing joy! As an adult, I don't often give myself free reign to just jump in and experiment with something, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. This was a challenge for me in many ways, but most importantly to my confidence. Especially early on, I nearly gave up on my Jester's Cap for good several times - I thought it was too juvenile, too hokey, too kitschy, too amateurish. How, I wondered, could I possibly submit this to the SFSNAD?

But as I persevered, something amazing happened! I remembered The Glue Box and the happiness of making something just for the sake of making something. To my surprise, I found a measure of real joy, and in these difficult days of loss and family illness, it is all the rarer. It's a true treasure to find, and I am extremely grateful. In the future, I hope to do some more Spontaneous Stitching, and I highly recommend trying it!

Thanks very much to The San Francisco School of Needlework & Design (SFSNAD) and Kreinik for hosting the Stitch At Home Challenge and for opening it up to International stitchers like myself! I really enjoyed trying new techniques (the felt applique and ribbon ruching), new materials (Kreinik metallic threads) and expanding my stitchy horizons!

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Helpful Articles About Kreinik Metallic Threads:

💠 From the Kreinik blog: How to Read a Kreinik Thread Label
💠 Nordic Needle's Stitching Guide on Kreinik Metallics has a brief overview of the history of metallic threads and the Kreinik Company, as well as stitched samples;
💠 Peacock & Fig has a wonderful article that demonstrates the difference between the Blending Filament and the Braids in great stitched samples;
💠 The Cross Stitch Review Blog has very detailed overview of the Blending Filament;
💠 Ancora Crafts has an in-depth Glow In The Dark Thread comparison, in which most of the contenders are Kreinik, as does the Freudian Stitch blog.

Have you ever tried indulging your whims and Spontaneously Stitching? Would you?!

Finish: 🐝🌸 Bee Happy Brooch 🌸🐝

Love & Roses Vintage Brooch
Free Stamped Cross Stitch Kit
with Cross Stitcher magazine (UK), March 2018

I hope everyone is having a nice Summer, despite the heatwaves everywhere! It hasn't been that warm here compared to other places, but I'm not used to the heat and it's been challenging with temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius, plus Humidexes between 35-38 every day. Needless to say, I haven't been able to do much stitching!

This is Cross Stitcher, the UK magazine, from March 2018 which my Stitchy Guru Mother bought me as a little everyday cheer-up kind of gift, which are always fun to receive! The kit is the Love and Roses Vintage Brooch:

It is a Stamped Cross-Stitch motif with flowering branches, a bee, two ribbon roses and a little saying. My favourite part was that you could choose which phrase you wanted; the kit was shown with "Mum" but I chose the "Bee Happy" to go with the bee ❤🐝

For anyone who would rather stitch it regularly, a chart is included in the magazine.

The one thing that gave me trouble was the fabric. It is supposed to be "Shabby Chic", but to me too much fraying just looks plain shabby. So I added some iron-on interfacing (off the bolt from the local quilt store, Pellon brand) to the back of the piece and it really helped immensely, especially when it came to cutting out the little saying, the Made with Love piece for the back and trimming the edges. It cut down on the fabric puckering too, so I'd really recommend doing this before stitching your own kit, or anything like it!

Of course, I did make a few changes 😄 The thread given in the kit to stitch the bee was navy blue (?!), so I substituted DMC 3371 (Black Brown) for it. I also used 3 strands of floss instead of 2, to better cover the stamped blue lines, and I even had a little left over! I added a stitch to fill in the Lazy Daisy leaves, and the little blue French Knot flowers were on the chart, although not shown on the kit cover.

Finally, I switched the two white buttons out with two from my Grandma's button tin, a pink and a yellow and I'm very pleased with how they look! She's not sure where they came from, so there's no particular story attached, but I love that they have a family connection. I also added DMC 996 to attach the pinback and for the Buttonhole Stitch along the Made with Love tag on the back (3 strands) and the front edging (6 strands).

The motif was supposed to be stitched to the backing with Running Stitch, but the Buttonhole Stitch helped pull the fabric straight and covered up the cut edges, which frayed a little even with the added interfacing. I left the guidelines for the Running Stitch visible deliberately, as that turquoise matches the text on the labels and nothing else did. If I had thought about it, I would have worked the blue French Knot flowers in turquoise, but this didn't occur to me until after I had them stitched in!

My favourite part was the Ribbon Roses! Although the lengths of ribbon given could have been longer, this is such an easy and effective stitch and something I'd love to try more of in the future! All in all this was a fun little project, once I got past the frustration of the fabric, and I really enjoyed that it included some different stitchy techniques (Stamped Cross-Stitch, Embroidery and Ribbon Embroidery).

One thing I did learn - Stamped Cross-Stitch is not nearly as easy as I'd always thought it would be! My Grandma has a lovely cushion, four little birds for each of the Seasons, that she bought at a yard sale done in the technique. The work is even and fine except for a few wonky stitches, and those "mistakes" always bothered me.

Now I know that they are the norm, not the exception, and greatly respect how well the majority of the work was stitched! A lot of vintage kits were Stamped Cross-Stitch - dresser cloths, tea towels, doilies - and I always thought I'd like to try them. But it is extremely difficult getting both legs of the cross-stitch even, and fitting groups of cross-stitches together. I greatly prefer working on counted cloth, and it made me realize afresh what a miracle Aida cloth was when it was invented 😊💟

Have you ever try Stamped Cross-Stitch, or Ribbon Embroidery, or would you like to?

Freebie: 🌷 Spring Floral Tile 🌷

Free .PDF at my Dropbox: Spring Floral Tile

Please Note: You may see a screen asking you to create a Dropbox account, but you do NOT need to create an account to view and save the file. Scroll down the pop-up sign-up box and click on "No thanks continue to view" just under the big blue Create Account button. If you have any problems downloading, please let me know - my e-mail is in my sidebar on the right, under the pretty postage stamps.

You might remember my last post about this project, my entry in DMC's Spring Florals Instagram Contest? The Contest closed in May, and after a lot of suspense, it turned out that I wasn't one of the five winners. To view the winners, visit @dmc_embroidery.

But I really enjoyed designing and stitching this cute little garden, and I thought you might like to stitch it too! So I'm sharing the pattern for free, for personal and charitable stitching (as usual, please don't sell the pattern itself, or items made from it).

If you look closely, there are several mini-motifs. The center square would make a lovely ornament, one of the corner flowers could be a nice scissors fob, and the line of tulips could be repeated along the edge of a dishtowel or pillowcase 😊

If you do stitch up your own Spring Floral Tile, or any variation of thereof, I would so very much love to see your work 💕 Please send me a picture, or a link to your photo! My e-mail is in the sidebar, and I'm @aureliaeglantine on Instagram 🌷

Hope you're having a lovely Summer! The flowers have been slow to bloom this year, so I am happy to have some cross-stitched ones to cheer me up 💐

A New Start With Spring: DMC Contest

My entry for DMC's Spring Florals Instagram Contest

@aureliaeglantine

Project Information

"Floral  Tile"

84 x 84 stitches

12 colours of DMC floss

Whole and 3/4 cross-stitches: 3 strands

Back Stitch: 1 strand, except on tulip stems where 3 strands were used

Stitched size: 6 inches square on

14 Count Charles Craft Aida

10 Hoopla

Hello, hello! I know it's been a while :) So much has changed in my life since the last time I blogged. My beloved Grandpa passed away on Christmas Day 2016. I've written dozens of drafts posts since and have come to the conclusion that I'm just not ready to talk about it yet and, in all honesty, I may never be. Thank you to everybody who left comments with best wishes, they were very much appreciated. To anyone who is reading this and kept me in their feeds - thank you! I'm very grateful for your support :)

Although I'm not ready to blog again yet, thanks to a good friend of mine, I recently joined Instagram! I've never been one for social media so it's a sharp learning curve but there is so much beautiful cross-stitch and embroidery work that it's worth it! Although I don't have an iAnything, it is free to join and follow/comment on people's feeds. There is just so much inspiring content! I find new people to follow nearly every day.

The flowers are stylized, but include my Spring favourites: tuilps, hydrangeas, dahlias and this pretty marigold :)

I thought that was all I would be able to do though - follow and comment. Imagine my delight when I discovered a free app in the Windows store called Likegram, that allows me to post my own photos too! I've been having tons of fun with the Throwback Thursday (#tbthursday) hashtag and posting up pictures of past needlework projects from the blog. It's been nice to have an excuse to go through my archives: there are a lot of things I totally forgot about LOL

This leads me to a wonderful coincidence. DMC has a very active Instagram account (@dmc_embroidery) and they recently announced a new cross-stitch contest, Spring Florals. Five winners would get their patterns featured as a freebie in DMC's 1000 Patterns Project and a goodie bag with unspecified contents.  

Unfortunately the contest became a matter of contention as designers insisted that credit or "exposure" was not enough and that they should be paid for the winning pattern, which is really spec work. Abby Glassenberg wrote an article about it for the Craft Industry Alliance blog that ignited a firestorm. While she made some good points, and the rules did need clarification, it quickly descended into a lot of profanity laced posts which you should be aware of before searching the #dmcxstitchcontest hashtag.

DMC, being the upstanding company that they are, apologized and is now offering the five winners $500 each! It has also vowed to make the rules clearer in the future :) 

This is the chart for my entry! I know it's a real long shot that I'll win, and I almost gave up on the idea too many times to count along the way, but it was a wonderful distraction to design and stitch this project, with the cheerful bright Spring colours!  And I feel a sense of accomplishment that I actually saw it through. Really, I've already won because I gained my stitchy confidence back :) But it would be so amazing to win in reality!

Click on the collage to see a bigger version

Here's a side by side comparison of Floral Tile both before (left) and after the Back Stitching (right). I know a lot of stitchers dislike Back Stitch and find it tedious, but I'm always amazed by how much difference it makes! I love the definition it provides and the way it allows you to fit a lot of detail in a small area. I also leave all my Back Stitching to the end, instead of doing each section as I go, as I find it's easy to work up a rhythm and seeing the change in a simple pattern like this is like magic!

I'd love it if you'd let me know what you think of Floral Tile :)

And if you're on Instagram, come and say hello! 

@aureliaeglantine