I got the house I stitched up professionally framed last week and it came out beautifully!  I really wanted to have the matting  match the shape of the house so went to my favourite framing shop and looked at the dozen of reds available for mats, outlined what I wanted (I didnt really have a good idea on the spacing, but she di), and a week later, I had this!  I’m hoping this piece can be something that stays in my family for a long time.

I had been looking at juneatnoon’s 1109 Poplar house pattern since before I got pregnant. I waited till I knew I was having a girl before buying the pattern. It’s a busy redwork pattern that is so large it needs to be printed on legal paper. There are tons of adorable details, like the little doll in the attic, or the wallpaper in the stairwell that make the piece super interesting to look at.

Tracing it out was difficult because of the sheer size and level of detail it entailed. I ended up needing to tape the fabric, the transfer paper and the pattern to the table/each other to keep everything steady for the time it took me to trace it. I also, after a few minutes, pulled out a long ruler to help me with all the straight lines. I didn’t use it or one of the sides of the house, and the pattern definitely suffered for it. As I was stitching the right side rooms, lamps and desks tended to stick out of the building. I fixed it by the end, but the long edges aren’t perfectly straight.

Overall, the pattern was a joy to stitch up, each floor and each room splitting up a large project into bite sized pieces that were manageable. The house took me a little over a week to finish, on and off.

I edited the pattern a slight bit, putting Zoe’s name on the box in the attic. I want her to know, later on, that it was stitched just for her while we were waiting for her to make her big debut.

I am going to get it professionally framed, but I have a really good idea of what I want them to do with the frame/matting, so there should be an update on this piece in the near future.

One of the patterns I drew up recently features Alcohol Inky Caps, pretty, semi-poisonous mushrooms.  I was instantly struck by the caps as they matured and rolled up, and with a bit of research I learned that this is a typical mushroom move, exposing their spores and curling up as they dry out, allowing the spores closer to the centre to have access to the outside world.  It seems a lot of mushrooms do this, if you check out these cute little guys I saw outside my apartment building.

To me, the drying, underside of the mushrooms look just like a thick, black buttonhole stitch.  The streaky lines are the perfect analog for the spores and by combining two nearly black strands with one dark brown strand, I managed to get an organic look.

Some stitches lend themselves so perfectly to certain natural elements, it always amazes me.  Imagine a snail, sludging around, his shell a pretty swirl of bullion knots, maybe over felt padding to give it extra height.  Wouldn’t that be fabulous?  The Unbroken Thread recently featured a very clear tutorial on bullion knots, which I plan to practice to get this snail in reality.

Another project I am working on right now is a stitched version of this cute out of print poster for friends.  It’s a honey badger and he just don’t care.  To stitch the mess of snakes he is attacking/eating, I’m going to try and do a very tight, very small buttonhole stitch in various shades of green.  I am hoping that it’ll give each segment of the snake its own, completed look, while still looking messy and tangled.  It’ll be complicated, but I’m looking forward to it.  I plan to fill in the badger with crazy fuzzy stitches that’ll hopefully look like messy, dirty fur.  We’ll see how it goes!

Can you think of any other stitches that lend themselves extraordinarily well to embroidery?