The Accidental Embroiderer

A couple of rather boring freebies

Well, it’s almost April so it’s just about time for some new freebies. Maybe they’re not very exciting - just some leafy squares – but all the same these simple designs can be very useful sometimes, in making decorative objects or as additions to quilts. And you could always duplicate, mirror and flip them to make a larger square out of them

Leafy square 1

 

Leafy square 2

I have a few more designs in this “leafy square” series and I’ll be putting some of them up as free designs in May or June, so you might want to wait until you have the complete set before deciding where to use them

Once again there’s no need for a worksheet. They’re both for the 4 x 4 inch (100 x 100 mm) hoop, and there are just two colours – moss green for the leaves and emerald green for the stems. Here is number 1, and here is number 2, both in .pes v.6

By the way, a small number people have had problems downloading files from the blog. If that small number includes you, just drop me a line (via the "Comments" section of the blog) and I'll send them to you as e-mail attachments

 

Some more strange designs

A couple of weeks ago I posted two designs that I was doing for a quilt – the designs requested were quite unusual and reflected the interests of the person who was going to receive the quilt. So I had to design and stitch some mushrooms, and then a frog, and this was about the first time that I had been asked for embroideries of such interesting subjects

Well, this week we have two more more unusual designs. More mushrooms - chanterelles this time. And strangest of all we have three snails! The thought of making an embroidery of snails had never ever occurred to me

Chanterelles

 

...and some snails

 

It’s been a lot of fun designing and digitising these unusual things, and quite a change from what I normally do. Maybe I should try to break out of the “conventional” box a little more often!

 

 

A spectacular entry

Regular blog readers will know that I do a lot of work with my friend Cherri, who lives in Florida. Cherri is an enthusiastic maker of quilts, and I am only too happy to design and digitise anything she might need for her work. Recently she had what was to me an eccentric request – to make a large number of designs of bugs and beetles. So I set to work. I’m still not sure exactly how many I did but there were a lot! And here is the result, on display at the AQS Quilt Show, in Daytona Beach, Florida.

 

Cherri and the Entomologist's Dream

 

She calls the quilt The Entomologist’s Dream. Now if that’s not an original idea, I don’t know what is! If you want to see more of her work, have a look at

https://www.instagram.com/cherriberi1/

 

Two little free cats

Judging from the response to the recent cat designs I’ve posted, there are a good number of cat lovers among blog readers. So - here are a couple of free ones for your collection. They’re very old designs – I must have done them more than 10 years ago - but they’re none the worse for that. They’re quite small, for the 4x4 inch (100 mm x 100mm) hoop, because I did them in the days when you couldn’t get hoops more than a few inches across. I certainly wouldn’t limit myself to that size today!

The Black Cat

They’re all embroidery (no applique) and once again I’m not bothering with worksheets as they’re pretty self-explanatory. All you have to do is follow the colour instructions and you should end up with something much like the stitchouts

The Brown Cat

Here's the black cat, in .pes v.6, and here's the brown cat, in the same format