A Maple Leaf for a Canadian Traveler!

As Winter sets in and Christmas is coming just around the corner, I want to take a step back and bid a fond Farewell to Autumn! You may remember the Lolli & Grace Autumn Leaf SAL from October; if you do, this design will be very familiar 😊 My best friend loved the finished needlepainting project so much she almost took it home with her LOL

Although she's always generously supportive of everything I make, it's been a while since she so obviously fell in love with one of my projects. She mentioned it would make a nice bag - a tote, or a purse - and after some thought, I decided to stitch a "bag brooch".

She's not one for wearing pins or brooches on a shirt or coat, so I wanted a larger motif she could pin to any of the canvas messanger bags she usually carries. The pins make it removable, for when the Autumn season is over. She's also a globetrotter who loves to travel, and Canadians like ourselves often wear badges or pins with the Maple Leaf to find fellow explorers, so this colourful little brooch can also serve that purpose!

I hope it will be a fun reminder of home when she's off having adventures abroad ❤

Here's the brooch in comparison with the original project! For the hoop, I enlarged the pattern slightly; for the brooch, I used the original Maple Leaf sizing. The colours and technique are the same. If you would like to stitch your own, the pattern, stitch guide and incredibly helpful video tutorials are all still available on the Lolli & Grace site, and you can find all the direct links in my project post.

This was my first time finishing an oversized embroidered brooch, and it was very much a trial-and-error process! I stitched my leaf on felt, just ordinary acrylic craft felt, in a pretty turquoise colour. Originally, I wanted to cut the border following the outline of the leaf, but I was rushed for time and went with a simple circle. In the end, I really like the extra colour, and the way the felt picks up those beautiful blues Anne chose that make this project so unique 🎨

I did baste a square of sew-on stabilizer to the back, for extra strength:

The brand is Pellon, but I'm not sure which type. It is very firm. I bought it off the bolt at my local craft shop. It did require a little extra strength to sew through it, but it made sure the felt didn't stretch (which was extra likely since I was stitching in hand without a hoop!) and it really helped to make sure the felt didn't pucker under the weight of all that thread painting. All the different colours result in quite a few layers of thread!

When I was finished stitching, I removed the basting threads. Since I was going for an outline finish at first, I spent some time cutting the stabilizer close to the stitching but in hindsight I would have just cut it to the circle shape, as it would have added some extra support to the backing. And would've been so much simpler 😄

The main problem with finishing an oversize brooch is making it stiff enough to stand on its own and keep its shape. Although I don't have any pictures of the process, what I did was cut the top of a clean plastic salad container - the kind you get from the deli - to shape. This type of plastic is clear and somewhat flexible. I did not want a thick plastic that might get brittle, and so be more likely to break.

I cut the plastic circle about 1/4 inch smaller than the felt, to give me room for my Blanket Stitch Edging. I punched four holes in the middle of the plastic with a hole punch. Then I cut a circle of polyester quilt backing, and sewed that to the plastic, tacking through the circles. This gave me a stiff insert with batting on one side.

For the back, I cut out a matching circle of felt, and sewed two pinbacks on either side of the middle. I used two because the brooch is oversize, and I wanted some extra security. To assemble, I put the insert batting side up - to cushion to the back of the stitches - and sandwiched it between the embroidery (right side up) and the backing circle of felt. Then I sewed the edges with blanket stitch.

I'm very happy to say that that recipient is very pleased with her bag brooch! I really like that the brooch is removeable and can be pinned to anything fabric. I hope the finish holds up with wear, but only time will tell 😊

✈ Do you have a traveler in your life? Have you ever stitched something for them? 🌍

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?