Delightful stitch

I usually break out the Copic markers and floral stamps (Power Poppy anyone?) when Mother’s Day comes around, but this year I looked through my digi stamps and nothing leapt out at me saying “colour me, colour me”. And because my energy levels aren’t great at the moment, I was even thinking about making my apologies and skipping the card-making altogether this year.

Then I started thinking about embroidery. I’ve been really enjoying hand stitching recently and, with the success of the panda card, I decided to have another go at turning a stamp into a stitched design. This time though, I turned to my physical stamps instead of the digis.

I could have taken the same approach to transferring the design as I did with the digi stamp — stamp it in black on paper and use my light box to trace it onto the fabric — but I thought I’d try stamping it direct. I tested out a few of the lighter coloured inks I have, trying to find one that was visible enough to stitch over but wouldn’t be difficult to cover up. In the end I used Ink on 3’s fadeout ink which is designed to be used for no-line colouring. It’s waterproof, so I wouldn’t have the option of washing the marks out at the end, but I did discover that it can be mostly removed with alcohol: not perfectly, but enough to be useful when, for example, I decided not to stitch the whole design and removed an extra stem.

I have coloured this stamp — Delightful by Penny Black — three times before (weirdly I thought I’d only used it once and found the others when I was searching the blog for that post).

I decided to fill the leaves and petals using long and short stitch; this is the first time I’ve tried to use this stitch properly, especially with the thread colour change on the petals. The gradient on the leaves was created with careful selection of lengths of variegated thread. The stems were done in stem stitch and the centres of the flowers are French knots. There were one or two small marks left on the background from the stamping, which is why I started adding the scattered French knots across the top half.

I trimmed the finished piece down to size, mounted it on a card panel with a layer of felt for cushioning, and added that to a card base.

And my mum loved it, which is the really important part.