A little bit of stitchery....

My Instagram friends will know that I've been stitching up a storm in my embroidery hoop this last week. This was the perfect little project to work on while I was in hospital and at home recovering, as I could pick it up and work on it in very short little bursts when I felt up to it. And before I knew it, I was done. Here she is, Cherry on the Tree Swing :-)

I made this from Aneela Hoey's pattern. This is the first full embroidery project I've done in a few years, so I followed the colours and guide in the pattern, which was well written and easy to do. I had to reduce the pattern to 75% to get it to fit in my 8" hoop, it would work really nicely framed like a print too.

I also used an iron-on embroidery transfer pencil for the first time, which meant tracing over the reversed pattern and ironing the image onto the fabric. Honestly, I didn't much like this process. I ended up having to trace it twice to get the pencil clear enough to see, and wasted a good bit of fabric in my first few attempts with smudges etc. Plus, despite my best efforts, the pink of the pencil is showing through in a few places, although you need to be up close to see it. In future I think I'll return to tracing the image with my water-soluble pen which I am very comfortable using.

I used Aneela's tutorial on her blog to fill in Cherry's dress and hair with backstitch. My first time trying this technique - I'm pretty happy with the results. I wish that her facial expression/hair was a little more like the original but this was one of the problem areas in terms of pattern transfer, and I got it about as good as I could!

I really love the vibrant blue leaves, and the little cherries which were made using French knots. I experiemented with different sizes of knots, this not being a stitch I'd used before, and it worked pretty well in the pattern, giving differing sizes of cherries in different places which is perfect.

 

This morning, I glued the fabric to the hoop to finish it at the back and hung in on the wall over Rachel's cot - I'm delighted with this! I have some other hoops to do for her wall also - including one custom design which I can't wait to start. In the meantime, I'm hoping she will have fun looking at Cherry swinging happily on her tree.

P.S. Thank you everyone for your good wishes after my last post - I didn't get to reply to all the emails but the surgery went fine, I was a good bit sorer than I expected the first 24 hours as I had a reaction to something they used in the operation, but am very much on the mend now and taking it easy at home recovering.