Minikin Garden: A free pattern for World Embroidery Day 2017

Old needlework magazines usually came with iron-on transfers, some of them closing in on a century old now. It's fun to take elements from them to rework as contemporary hand embroidery patterns.

This is what I've done with Minikin Garden, a free pattern in celebration of World Embroidery Day at the end of the month, on 30 July.

I have quite a few vintage transfers filed away and was looking for something to do with the more appealing ones. My design style isn't really vintage, although I do like some of the old designs, and so I thought it'd be a good idea to take bits and pieces from the transfers and use them to create new designs, embroidered in fresh and bold colours. And because of the copyright ethics, you get them for free!

I did this for the first time last year with Blue Bird and so many of you have downloaded the pattern, more than 700 to date. It encouraged me to do the same again this year, although it didn't take much nudging because it's an easy and fun way to design and embroider something new. And I really wanted to use one of my vintage oval hoops.

You can download Minikin Garden from the free page of my website. 

Sylvan Garland, a woodland wreath

If Sylvan Garland looks familiar, it’s because this project originally appeared in Inspirations in Australia. But the magazine’s rights to exclusivity expired quite a while ago now and so I’ve created a PDF pattern for it. 

It's a light, fresh design that is fairly easy to embroider. The garland incorporates embroidered appliqué, which adds an extra dimension to the embroidery and is good for using up smaller pieces of your favourite fabrics.

At just under 40x40cm in size, it's a design with enough impact to work as standalone wall art or a feature cushion for the couch or perhaps a bedroom. 

The PDF pattern is available on Etsy and Craftsy. 

Embroidered insect #8: Anatomical Mantis

This delicately limbed fellow has been begging for an embroidered portrait, so here he is: Anatomical Mantis.

He's the eighth insect in my Anatomical range and a welcome addition with his muted hues of green, spindly legs and fragile wings.

The design is roughly the same size as the others in the range, which include an ant, bee, beetle, butterfly, dragonfly, moth and wasp. 

The PDF pattern is available as an instant download from Etsy and Craftsy.

Bookshelf: An embroidery pattern for lovers of books, dogs or both

Being a reader, I've wanted to design an embroidery featuring books for ages. And in fact I did come up with one for my book, Embroidered Home. But we had to scale back on the number of designs and so this one has been languishing in various formats for a few years now.

Flipping through back issues of Ideas magazine between then and now, I came across a project to make wooden bookends in the shape of a sausage dog and it reminded me of the bookshelf design. I scaled the books down to a more manageable size and added my own dog bookends to either side of the stack - only a dachshund really worked, because of its long body. I traced the design on to fabric and backed it with voile, ready to embroider ... and then it sat, and sat, and sat while I worked on other designs and editorial projects and pretty much forgot about it. 

I have a file of pattern ideas and patterns in progress that I dip into, which is where Bookshelf had been lurking. I wasn't happy with the colours I'd thought to use in Embroidered Home but hadn't managed to come up with a better idea. This is how the design ended up in the file in the first place.

I pulled it out and fortunately it sometimes happens that an idea just pops into your head. In this case it was to embroider the books in white through shades of grey to black and the bookends in bright yellow to make them pop. The bold colours made the design fresh and modern, and it finally felt right to me.

It can be quite exciting when an idea that's been rattling around in your brain for years suddenly comes together, and I embroidered Bookshelf in a weekend. I was almost sorry when it was done that I hadn't added more books! 

The graphic colourway lent itself well to a printable, so I've included one as a free extra on the last page of the pattern that you can print and frame as wall art for your home or perhaps a housewarming gift. 

Otherwise, the PDF embroidery pattern is available as an instant digital download from my Etsy and Craftsy shops.

Wild flowers, inspired by Africa

Wild Flowers was actually the first design idea in my Wild range of patterns. Sometimes it just works like that.

I spent a few days on the Highveld at the beginning of last year, walking and photographing the wild flowers, which were in bloom at the time. There were so many I could envisage in stitches, but it still turned out to be quite a challenge to pick and choose from the huge variety, and to figure out enough different stitches to keep the embroidered versions interesting to stitch. The other thing that took some mulling over was the thread colours. Unlike the other Wild patterns, this one needed more of a variety.

As such, although Wild Flowers fits in with Grass, Pods, Ferns and Coral in terms of size and feel, it is a bit of a standalone in that the colourway is a little different. And I've taken creative licence with the colours compared with the real-life flowers that inspired them. 

I thought about not doing this one, seeing as it had been sitting around for so long and was a little different from the other four. But I kept coming back to it and am glad I got it figured out in the end. The vibrant corals and yellows, combined with rich greens and two shades of white, are really pleasing on the eye. And the multitude of sometimes unusual embroidery stitches, some that I don't use all that regularly, drew me in and kept me embroidering long after I'd usually have stopped stitching for the day. 

The pattern is available on Etsy and Craftsy.