Sunday 27 September 2009

Bloomin’ Marvellous : 1

The weather’s turned, leaves are falling and winter is on its way – to the northern hemisphere at any rate. So I’ve decided to design another series of free embroidery patterns while stuck indoors for the next few months.

The theme is a bloomy one, although loosely interpreted, because the real blooms have faded and flowery designs are just fun to stitch. I’ve picked my fabric – white cotton and textured Irish linen – and a variety of muted, but light coloured six-stranded DMC threads and Mill Hill glass embroidery beads.


The design process will be quite different compared with the way I did the Jacobean Leaves, in that I’m going to post patterns as I design instead of finishing the entire project first. Two reasons for this: I don’t know what the finished article is yet, and it’ll be more spontaneous and creative this way.

It won’t be entirely random, though, as each design will fit neatly into a 4x4" square, or about 10x10cm. So the plan is to end up with a stack of embroidered squares to make up into… something. I’m going to stick to embroidering on white, because I have that piece of soft white cotton that needs embellishing, and I’ll decide where the linen comes into it once all the white blocks have been embroidered. As for how many blocks, well, that depends on how many ideas pop into my head. I’m aiming for somewhere between 12 and 24.

These are the DMC threads that I’ve chosen: 815, 816, 920, 3854, 727, 3078, 3857, 3858, 3859, 3722, 224, 407, 3860, 435, 434, 598, 931, 924, 3768, 503, 927, 3363, 3052, 3364, 522, 469, 772 and 938. But in the spontaneous spirit of this project, I may decide to add another one or two or not use some of these colours along the way. But this is the basic palette I’ll be using and I’ll put the DMC colour numbers on to each pattern in case you like the same shades.

So without further ado, here’s Bloomin’ Marvellous 1:


Download the pattern here.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Wow, been waiting patiently to see what you would do next, this is a love, thanks for sharing your work with us. Barb in western NC

Liz said...

Beautiful. It reminds me of a Japanese crest...

kat said...

Industrious as usual. x

Unknown said...

Thank you! I didn't get in on the Jacobean Leaves BOM, so I'm excited that I can do this one!

edward and lilly said...

It's lovely, I love the little stitches on the leaves :)

Anonymous said...

I like the muted color palette you've chosen for this series.