Erica's Stitches

 © 2009 Erica Cannon Happy Halloween! This was spontaneous so I haven't had time to stitch it or decide what colors to use.  Yes, I know mostly orange.  But should it be a really really bright orange, orange sherbet, burnt orange?  You decide.

Up until now I've been writing about my designs chronologically.  I'm going out of sequence now because this is a good time for a Halloween design. This was based upon my "Circle of Seasons" which I'll write about soon.  It has a snowflake in the center, then spring green leaves, flowers and along the outside fall leaves.  As I was working on it, my mind wandered on to other possible circles, the Halloween Circle being one of them.  I changed the outer fall leaves and decided to fill the center with Halloweeny designs.  The bats and the pumpking came quickly.  I even tried a bigger pumpkin in the center.  But I abandoned that when I came up with the spider idea.  4 small spiders are way too many spiders for me.  So the pumpkins became smaller and went in the inner circle.  I love the pattern the vine makes as they curl around. The spider was a challenge.  All my initial sketches either looked dorky or too c...

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...

Antique Samplers - Home I enjoy antique samplers. Unfortunatly I don't own to show. But there many pictures on the web, including the web site above. What do I like about these samplers? 1) Alphabets - Sometimes incomplete, sometimes with missing or extra (?!) letters, sometimes multiple alphabets, sometimes capitalized and sometimes in lowercase and they even show up in a variety of stitches. 2) Motifs - Samplers come with a variety of motifs sometimes without explanation or relevance to the rest of the sampler - dogs, rabbits, flowers, trees, birds, deer, crowns. I've even seen one with a lobster. 3) Houses - Featured in many samplers they are almost never to scale. They will be towered over by people, trees, flowers, dogs, etc. - see #2. 4) Sayings - the older the sampler, sometimes the more obscure 5) Personal Info - name, date, location (some done by extremely young girls who shouldn't have the patience for such an undertaking) 6) Vines - a border of a ...

Having made many simple striped shaped and having advanced to a striped heart, I decided to try something more complicated.  I sketched a simple mountain scene to fit in a small square and started filling it in with stripes of color to see how it would turn out.  I started with the trees and then the sky since they where simpler.  At this point I showed it to a friend.  Her jaw dropped and she said "You should be selling patterns".  Her words echoed in my mind as I continued.  I decided to make the mountains brown with a tint of purple.  The lake was the most difficult.  I went through years of accumulated mountain pictures looking at lakes deciding what color it should be.  Lakes are reflected color and don't seem to have a color of their own.  I decided to go with lighter versions of the rest of the colors and add some simple reflections.  Luckily, it resembled a lake when I was done. "You should be selling patterns" was sti...