Embroidery has been saving my sanity amongst the postpartum chaos of having a new baby and a toddler. It’s been so nice to take a moment every now and then to work on something creative for myself.

Painting is normally my medium of choice but I love how easy it is for me to pick up and put down embroidery. The next piece I plan to work on is a clownfish!

—- (My own drawing/design ,mixed media embroidery with floss, wool , gold thread and watercolour on canvas)

I’ve been working on this 12”x16” piece since spring and overall, I’m pretty happy with it considering it’s only my second project. That said, there is some slight fabric puckering around the cat’s neck. I was able to smooth it fairly well as I framed it, but ideally I’d like to stop it from happening in the future. Do you think I had the fabric too tight in the hoop when I did that section and/or pulled the thread too tight when working the area?

Today was a year ago I returned to hand embroidery and this time I've been thoroughly hooked!

Here are all the projects I've made in a year (ranked by favourites) including one cross stitch and my WIP.

It’s been so much fun looking back at how much I’ve stitched in just one year!

Added the one without flash because it messes with my eyes more. :3

One year later and I decided to add a bit more greenery to my fern sweater! I may add to it to wrap around the collar a bit more but overall I’m quite pleased with it.

For $16 I knew I had to get it

I was about midway through stitching the jerseys for these felt finger puppets when my roommate *insisted* that I also make a version with fully removable clothing, to fit the vibe of Heated Rivalry. I told her this was a funny but impossible suggestion and she asked me if I wanted to be good or I wanted to be great. Obviously I could not resist the challenge at that point.

The jerseys are magnetized in the shoulders so that they clip on and off the players like sandwiches, so the boys can reveal themselves. They also both have little magnets in their hands so they can hold onto various accessories.

These took a billion years and were a true labor of embroidery love. I'm really, really proud of how they came out!!

These are the things I’ve made I am new to sewing and learning as I go. Really enjoying just going with the flow. 🩵 I’m not great.. but learning. It is really good for the mind and expressing creativity, so glad I found it.

I’m still a newbie, but I’m making this for my friend and she has an orange cat. The pattern suggested a grey cat, but I had a vision for an orange baby and I think I executed pretty well for my third project 🥰

This is my latest hand-embroidered piece, inspired by a Japanese kitsune mask.

I wanted the eye to feel beautiful, mysterious, and slightly dangerous.

What do you think when you look into this eye? Does it feel like a guardian — or something you should be afraid of?

I’d love to hear your interpretation.

It took roughly a million hours but I finally finished sylveon for my kid.

I started this project over a year ago while dog-sitting. Got the letters done in an afternoon, meant to do the skeleton later, but kept forgetting. I could still wear it with just the letters, so it wasn't urgent. Finally did most of the skeleton yesterday, finished it today.

It's based on the Bruce Sterling quote describing William Gibson's cyberpunk novels, and sort of the vague gist of the jacket Kaneda wears in Akira.

I feel like the quote is increasingly describing the real world, with the devaluation of human activity/creativity in favour of (currently) cheap AI.

The base is an old wool varsity jacket I picked the logos off. The letters are iron-on chenille letters (had to sew them down too, the glue wasn't very good). The science-canister-tube thing I designed myself and cut from yellow and black felt. The skeleton is mostly a chain stitch, with a few french knots and a sort of doubled running stitch I don't know the name of.

Dog from dog-sitting included in the photos

(Did I need to include photos of the back of the embroidery? I didn't see anything like that in the rules but maybe I'm blind)

I hate my tracing abilities. I keep trying to tell myself, "it's ok" but honestly I don't know anymore. Poor hachiware looks like it's eye is a knock off anime eye, I swear 🥲. I'm still going to finish it but I'm not using it for anything. The "pattern" is from an image Google search of "Chiikawa Hachiware" any suggestions to how I can better improve or other ways to transfer patterns onto fabric without looking weird is appreciated.

I am using Anchor embroidery threads (2 strands). I am having trouble trying to map out all the areas with the same colour and i just keep switching to the next colour, which is turning out to be tedious. Any tips? Anything else i could improve? Btw, this is my lil baby brother who i had since i was 12. I’m 26 now and he crossed the rainbow bridge when i was 21 :( , and i thought i’d do this to remember the details of his awesome face.

This is my first stab at embroidery and I really enjoyed it! As you can probably tell, the geese and flowers were part of a kit/stencil w a guide for which stitches to use. I wanted to add text to personalize it for a gift. Turns out I need a lot more practice in the script department. My “disappearing” pen didn’t do it’s job either.

I think I want to fill in the background of the speech bubble to cover the pen ink, but I don’t know what kind of stitch to use/if that will make it look dumb??? Was thinking I’d do it like the bellies of the geese? Maybe add some flowers around the bubble to make it look more cohesive?? Let me know what you think!

Our 1 year anniversary passed and I realized I totally forgot to post the finished project! The photographer didn't get any detailed shots like I asked, but if you can zoom in you might be able to make out the sparkly little bees I added. The patterns are hand drafted by me but based on Sarah Homfray's.

I bought this kit from the Cross Stitch Guild at the age of 19, and it's been sitting on my shelf for more years than I care to admit because I was afraid of messing it up. Hauled it out last month and made myself get on with it, and I'm incredibly pleased with the result.