What Are You Working On? is for all things hand-made, home-made, and creative in a variety of mediums.
Welcome to What Are You Working On? where we talk about (and often display) our handiwork, whether yarn and fabric crafts, woodwork, metalwork, art, or anything else “crafty”.
I don’t always get my Christmas gifts done on time, because many of them are quite time consuming. So far I haven’t heard any complaints about late gifts.
The embroidery pattern for the Queen Pomegranate is by Kathy Andrews. I took this class at the EGA National meeting in Chicago in 2020.
Here, as often happens, I may like a pattern overall, but I do some adaptions as they aren’t quite what I want. Below is the original pattern.
You can see the main differences is the sides. I did do the left side as the pattern showed and hated it. Too busy. So I cut it all out and re-embroidered with a more traditional stitch called a stem stitch.
I also redid the leaf stems, but I’m not sure I like my design there, so I am thinking of cutting what I did and redoing them like the pattern. I will take me less that an hour.
To explain the stitches used, I’ll describe them working from top down. The top of the pomegranate is done in stem stitch (the straight lines); long and short shading stitches on the leaves and French knots in the blue.
Around the pomegranate itself is chain stitch in the original. I found it too lumpy so did it again the stem stitch.
The sides pattern that I didn’t use would have been Battlement couching with detached a chain stitch in the middle. What I did was stem stitch shading the colors as they go inward.
The next round, what I call the pomegranate finished seeds, is done with raised leaf stitch (red) and straight stitch in green underneath.
The center of the pomegranate is laid and couched Trellis (the laid work is red and the Trellis aspect is the blue crossing stitches. In the middle are yellow French knots. The knots are deliberately different sizes. (beginning seeds) Surrounding that is stem stitch. I did it just in yellow. The pattern shows yellow and blue.
The stem is very close packed chain stitch.
The leaves are first outlined in split stitch and then have long and short shading going over the top of the split stitches.
The leaf stems I did in wrapped stem stitch but as I said above, I will redo them the multicolored stem stitch.
The best person for instruction on embroidery stitches, IMHO, is Sarah Homfrey. I am a patreon because of her excellent work and her willingness to provide instruction for free. Below is the link for stem stitch, but you can find any of the stitches described above on Utube, by using the terms Sarah Homfrey and whatever stitch you are interested in. I didn’t want this to be a diary that would take forever to load so I just have the one link.
So What Are You Working On?