Erica's Stitches

I made my first pattern based on a scanned photo with the help of software.  This hardy columbine was burned to the ground, quickly grew back and was flowering within a month. The first step was to crop the photograph and brighten the colors.  After importing into  PC Stitch , I spent hours tweaking the number of stitches and colors trying to come up with a stitchable pattern.   The software couldn't deal with the center of the flower (the yellow part) at all and I had to manually fix it.  Except for the yellow, the colors all came from the software and they are perfect.  Every shade of purple I have was used. With too few colors it was an unrecognizable blob and with too many colors the pattern was impossible.  I ended up manually reducing the colors until I thought I could handle stitching it.  I was tempted to give up, but I loved how the pattern was turning out so I kept at it. I think that there are still too many color cha...

Ah, the joys of an assortment of bulbs.  As soon as one color tulip fades away, another starts blooming. Right now these red and yellow tulips are blooming and also some lemon yellow ones are just beginning to flower. For the Spring Garden SAL I've started stitching.  After doing the center motif about 3 times and not liking the result, I switched fabric.  The linen I originally chose isn't suited for blackwork. This fabric is more even and tightly woven and the stitches don't disappear.  I also changed the colors a bit.  I swapped out the bright red for a more subdued color (which coincidentally are about the same shade as the tulips now blooming).  I've also made a few tweaks to the pattern as I go along. I'm notorious for not liking hearts (sorry) and there are 2 hearts coming up.  I haven't decided if I'll stitch them or not.  The instructions include graph paper so I have a feeling I'll be doing some dood...

I've been cutting out flower pieces.  Last August I appliqued some Harebells .  I wanted to do a bunch of other wildflowers and somehow never got around to it.  That's what new years are for - getting back on focus. This time I'm working on Mexican Hats and Penstemons.  Right now it looks like flowers have exploded in my quilt room.  These flowers have a lot of smaller pieces so I'm not sure how they will quilt up.  I do know that they will definitely need the stems to give them some shape.  That's next. Looking at the scattered remains of my morning session I'm getting ideas form more quilt blocks.  Some of the shapes created by cutting out the flower shapes very are interesting.  

Here's my latest cross-stitch design available on patternsonline . I have 4 of these 3x3 inch frames and I need to get them filled.  I decided to stitch various flowers from my garden and picked blue flax for the first flower. As you can see the stems and leaves are very delicate and they have a blueish-purple flower. This is Linum Lewissi named for Meriwether Lewis of Lewis and Clark fame. Linen, the fabric I often stitch on is made from Linum Usitatissumum.  Blue flax must have similar characteristics because my wildflower guide states that the American Indians did twist the stems into fishing lines. It is very difficult to photograph flax on a windy day.  But, I discovered that they make great shadows. On my to-do list is to play with some of the shadow photos on Photoshop.  If I can get a pleasing arrangement I may try a feature of my cross-stitch software that I haven't used yet.  I can upload a photo and have it automaticall...

Since I have framed the stitched Bleeding Heart from Curtis Boehringer's Wildflowers of America I decided to track down the other 3 wildflowers that had I stiched earlier.  I chose these flowers because they reminded me of the forests of Ohio where I grew up - Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Wake Robin and Bloodroot. The Jack-in-the-Pulpit and Wake Robin where both finished with fabric frames.  This was a favorite finishing technique of mine for a long time.  On the back they are dated 1999 - that was a while ago.  I remember the quilt store where I purchased the fabric, but not its name.  It's gone now but it was in an old Victorian house in Old Colorado City.  The turrets where lined with bolts of fabric and hey had a great selection of plaids. I had never heard name Wake Robin before and it means nothing to me, but the flower is definitely a Trillium.  Back then, I dutifully followed the pattern.  Now I would have used the name Trillium ...

I've gotten another piece framed.  I'm afraid that this stitched piece has been sitting in a drawer for over 10 years so it's about time. The frame came from gift box of frames and is a simple 5 x 7 frame.  Several of these where in the box - 2 of them unfinished wood.  This one was painted unevenly - like the phone rang and interrupted the painting and it was never finished.  On the bottom and left sides there is a lot of gold and almost none on the top and right sides.  If I were painting it myself I would be more even.  But, I didn't paint it and I decided I'm happy with the way it looks.  Finished IS better than perfect.  I think there is a lesson there. I don't have the pattern anymore and I had to do some searching to find the designer of the pattern.  It is by Curtis Boehringer from the Wildflowers of America series and was published in the late 90's.  His website is his name and I discovered that I still like his pa...

The weather can change quickly here.  Thunderstorms on Thursday and a blizzard on Friday (continuing into Saturday). I woke up to discover the world covered snow. It was beautiful on the fences. But not so good on trees. Or the power lines. Luckily the plants that are adapted to this area can deal with snow.  Years ago I would have worried about all the plants that have started to sprout.  They always seem to bounce back.  The melting snow should guarantee some good wildflowers in a few months.

It was a beautiful day last Sunday and I got to spend a few hours cleaning out last years dead flowers from the garden and removing layers of pine needles.  It feels strange writing this as we got some surprise snow overnight (almost a foot and still coming down but more on that tomorrow - like the local weather forecaster I'm better the past then the future.) As I was re-familiarizing myself with the space I made an embarassing discovery.  The picture I posted last time of coneflowers, wasn't coneflowers.  I was looking through thumbnails of flowers and was fooled by the color.  The coneflowers aren't in that part of the garden.  Forgive me. Many of the flowers have started to sprout so I'm trying to guess what they are. Flower: Iris Certainty: 100%  Iris have very distictive leaves and I spent many hours last summer digging them up and replanting them along the driveway.  It was very dry afterwards and I was afraid they wouldn't come ba...

It seems like I've been working on this for months and it is finally done! This biscornu was a complete accident.  I was trying to design something else and the end result looked more like a coneflower than what I was trying to design, especially when I changed the color to bright pink. I love coneflowers and you can probably tell that based on the picture which is currently at the top of this blog.  Every year I scatter more seed and a few more coneflowers grow in my garden. As often happens, in this design I combine my love of flowers with my love of quilts. I've just finished going through my copy of "1000 Great Quilt Blocks" and didn't see this one.  If I pieced it, it would be a Log Cabin or a Cornerstone variation.  Like Log Cabin, the blocks can be arranged in many different patterns (and I had fun experimenting). One side of the biscornu has the quilt blocks in the center and the coneflowers on the outside.  On the flip side, the coneflowers ar...

Last August I got to spend a few beautiful days in Santa Fe eating great Northern New Mexican food and wandering through the Plaza and up Canyon Blvd.  I brought my camera and I filled the memory card with pictures of adobe buildings, doors, windows, trees and flowers.  I was sure I would be able to get a design or two out of the trip. My first attempt was a thread painting I did during a class at the local needlework store. It was done quickly without much planning but it has the basic elements of what would become the cross-stitch design. I went back to my photos to find the design elements I wanted to include. Hollyhock ... And more hollyhock ... and yarrow ...  and faded wood doors ... And flowerpots.  Somehow I didn't get any pictures of the flowerpots but they where just glorious so I had to include one. So there they are the elements of my Santa Fe Garden Sampler.  I wanted the adobe to be the linen showing through the stitching. ...

Alphabet Heart, my latest design evolved from my Red Flowers design.  As usual, my mind wandered as I stitched the Red Flowers.  I imagined it stitched with overdyed floss instead of plain old DMC floss.  I also realized I was not restricted to a square or rectangle.  The colors reminded me of Valentines Day and I remembered a heart shaped Altoids tin tucked away in a drawer. Sidetracked, I abandoned my stitching and rooted around for the tin and traced it onto graph paper.  I transferred the flower design into the heart outline.  The next challenge was colors.  I knew I had the perfect overdye.  I found it right away but was dismayed to find there was no tag on it.  I went to the local needlework store to play detective.  It is definitely silk, not cotton.  But, nothing at the store was the same colors - I must have gotten it in a kit.  I passed on an Internet search.  There are so many flosses out the...

Red Flowers was an experiment.  I started by making various flower shapes on graph paper.  Then I put them in the computer so I could "play" with them.  The first thing I noticed while copying, pasting and moving flowers was that the shape of one of the flowers formed a pattern when it was repeated next to itself.  So, I made a background of just that flower shape in a size to fit in a 4 x 6 frame (I had an empty frame to fill - why not make the stitching fit the frame instead of the other way around). Then I filled in the background with random flower shapes.  If you look at the upper right flower, you will see that it recedes into the background because it is sitting directly on the background.  All the others pop out at you.  I added some stems to connect the flowers and I was done designing. There was nothing fancy about stitching the pattern.  I used a remnant of Aida cloth and DMC floss.  I was afraid that the background...

Rocky Mountain Wildflowers This is my Rocky Mountain Wildflower Sampler.  Here I have featured two wildflowers that grow all over the Rocky Mountains.  They grow in my yard in the meadows just over 7,000 feet.  They also grow high up in the mountains over 10,000 feet. Rocky Mountain Bluebells These are Rocky Mountain Bluebells.  Every flower identification book I own has a different species of this plant in it.  Streamside Bluebells; Mertensia ciliata.  Tall Bluebells; Metensia paniculata.  Alpine Bluebells; Metensia alpina.  Long-flowered Bluebells; Mertensia longiflora.  I do not know which version this is. I first saw this flower along a small alpine stream near the ghost town of Hancock, CO, elevation 11,050.  When I moved here I was surprised when spring came along and bluebells sprouted up in my yard at 7,200 ft.  They are much shorter than the tall bluebells growing up higher - only 6 to 12 inches off the ground....

These are my Funky Flowers.  Until now, most of my flowers have been realistic interpretations.  These started as doodles.  I decided to see if they could be successfully transfered to cross stitch so I transferred one to a 4 inch graph paper square.  By working bigger you can definitely get in more detail.  I like the way the hastily scribbled leaves turned out. The flowers where more difficult.  Actually, upper left and bottom right where more difficult.  I liked the other two as soon as they where drawn.  But the difficult ones where redesigned many times.  Interestingly, those two are sort of based on real flowers (Upper left the blanketflower and bottom right a flower growing in a friends yard that I don't know the name of and never had a chance to look up).  Since the other 2 came totally out of my imagination they didn't have any expectations to live up to. Since the flowers where more cartoony I gave them black and whi...

I needed a Christmas pattern in the line and my other "gardens" - Sampler and Quilt - made me think of a Christmas Garden.  It was inspired by Martha Stewart and the beautiful mantles that show up in her Christmas magazines.  I put off designing this one for a long time.  The amaryllis scared me.  It is a complex flower for the amount of space I needed to fill and I didn't want it to use outlines.  Finally, I just sat down with some Christmas magazines and started sketching.  This time the containers where very simple done in rich reds and greens and embellished with metallics.  Many people look for excuses to add metallics to their stitching because they love the sparkle.  I typically look for excuses to exclude the metallics because I don't like dealing with them.  It ruins scissors, frays and it doesn't glide nicely through the fabric.  However, in this design the metallics where necessary.  Besides the containers, the chri...

As I worked on Samper Garden (previous post) my mind was thinking of other "gardens".  The first thing that popped into my mind was quilt block flowers.  I enjoy both quilting and cross stitch and like to find ways to insert quilts into cross stitch designs.  It's not as easy as it sounds.  At times I've thought and thought and not come up with anything so I jumped on the idea that came out of the blue. The left quilt flower is the Windblown Square.  I've admired this pattern since the first time I saw it in a book and have wanted to use it somewhere.  It always looks as if it as about to start twirling. The middle quilt flower is the Ohio Star and is one of my all time favorite quilt blocks.  It is a classic and not just because I was raised in Ohio.  Originally the 3 blocks where not touching but when I was drawing the pattern on the computer and cutting and pasting the blocks into position I discovered that they made an interesting patter...

Most of my flower designs have been rows of flowers.  I have many individual flowers I've charted over time but I hadn't figured out how to put them into a sampler design. At the same time my new patio had was finished.  The soil here is not ideal for gardening so I was out shopping for pots so I could set them on the patio and do some container gardening.  It is amazing how many pots there are available - they come in all colors, sizes and shapes. Finally, I managed to connect the two.  I could put my cross-stitch flowers into pots.  Taking a queue from antique samplers, I don't need to get the scale right or even have the flowers look realistic. Actually, the middle flower is quite realistic.  It is a called a Kashmir Sage (phlomis cashmeriana) and does rather well in my small real garden.  It grows several feet tall.  The design is the top few inches of the plant and I put it in the equivalent of a shot glass.  It al...

My "Les Fleurs des Bois" was full of bright, contemporary flowers.  I had made some flowers that didn't fit in with that sampler that I still wanted to use.  At the same time I had visions of an eyelet alphabet.  Eyelet stitches are different from cross stitches.  You can purposefully pull the thread tightly while stitching to distort the fabric and leave a hole.  Some antique samplers are done entirely with the eyelet stitch.  So, the basis for my next sampler was an eyelet ABC. Going with the antique theme, I pulled out a brown piece of linen.  This limited me to light and dark threads only.  Anything else was not visible on the background.  So, I was able to design some white flowers.  I also borrowed another theme from antique samplers - vines!  Vines never seem to line up on top of each other and I enjoy the patterns that they make.   I repeated the eyelet stitch in white flower.  These flowers are so st...

A whole 10 years had passed since my original Prospector's and I wanted to do another flower sampler to mark the anniversary.  The theme of Prosepector's this year was "Trees" and the seminar was in Boise and called "Les Bois Adventure".  I wanted to stitch flowers and I wanted to follow the theme.  So, to make the design work, I came up with the title "Les Fleurs des Bois" - the flowers of the woods.  That settled, I needed to pick the flowers to include so I pulled out all my flower identification books and started doodling and sketching.  I had more flowers than I could use.  The flowers I ended up using are all bright and colorful: Shooting Star - This is a flower I saw first in flower books as a child.  It wasn't until I traveled to the right part of Colorado that I saw them.  Shooting Star has always been one of my favorites.  Unfortunately, it doesn't grow on the plains and foothills where I live.  It is in th...