Welcoming 2025 with a free Art Nouveau and more...

Well, that’s another holiday season over for another year. I always enjoy the celebrations but all the same, it’s good to get back to Real Life again, even though it’s been snowing continually for several days here, so we’re pretty much snowed in. But we’re used to that up here in the Scottish Highlands! Anyway it’s time again for a freebie

This is a little Art Nouveau inspired square - it’s a simple design but it could find a home in many different kinds of projects - quilts, decorative hangings, purses, table linen, - whatever your imagination suggests. It’s for the 4 x 4 inch (100 100 mm) hoop and it’s embroidery only, with no applique

An Art Nouveau square for 2025

HERE is the design, in .pes v.6  Incidentally, I’d really love to be able to feature more free designs on this blog in 2025, so if you have any ideas for designs you’d like to see, please do let me know. I can’t promise to do everything, but I always love to have new thoughts of what people want from this kind of embroidery

Oh - and a Very Happy New Year to all of my readers. All best wishes for 2025, and thanks so much for your support

 I hope you've just received my message with the two free designs. Actually there were supposed to be THREE free Christmas designs, but Typepad refused to let me post images of all three, so I've had to put the third one in this separate message. It's just a simple Christmas star, but none the worse for being simple

If you want to make a card out of it, you will need a blank with an opening of 3 1/4 x 3 1/4 inches (80 x 80 mm), and the design itself will need to be stitched in a 4x4 inch (100 x 100 mm) hoop

HERE'S the design, in .pes v.6, and again. I really recommend that you stitch it all out in metallic thread. And I hope that's the last free design I'll be sending for a while now!

I've been getting more than a little anxious about this year’s Christmas cards. It’s not as if we have a huge list of people to send cards to, but I do like to send nice embroidered cards to as many people as I can. So the past week or so has been spent frantically painting fabric and stitching things out, and I thought perhaps other people might also like some new Christmas ideas. These are designed to be used on cards though of course you can do whatever you like with them

When I make cards, I buy blank cards of what are called “Tri-fold aperture cards” - if you Google the term you should find lots of suppliers. These are blank cards in which you glue your stitchouts behind a cut-out window and then fold the card together. These designs are designed to be used in cards with an oval opening of 3 x 4 1/2 inches (76 x 114 mm)  The digitised designs are surrounded by a vermilion “frame” in basting stitch, which shows where the opening of the card should fit. If this is of no use to you, just leave the frame out

HERE are the ornaments, and HERE is the poinsettia. Both designs are in .pes v.6, and will need to be stitched in a 5x7 inch (130 x 180 mm) hoop.  I very strongly suggest that you use metallic threads for the ornaments  - this really adds to the festive look of the design. The poinsettia should really be stitched mostly in ordinary thread, but you can use metallic gold for the ribbon (which is colour 2, Deep Gold)

Well, good luck if you try these! And I wish you a very happy holiday season. I’ll be back in January, with a freebie for the New Year.

Oh, and as always, if you have problems downloading these designs, just let me know through the “Comments” section of the blog

It’s occurred to me that I haven’t yet posted pictures of all the things I showed at this year’s NEOS exhibition, so that’s what we have this week. This is a first attempt of an idea that’s been haunting me for a while. When you spend a lot of time watching natural things like birds and plants and insects, sometimes they can seem to be turning into each other, That is, if you look at a mass of coloured butterflies fluttering above a bed-full of colourful flowers, it can be difficult to tell immediately which is which. So I’ve been working on some designs that use this idea, and this is the first one to be finished. I’m not sure just how successful it is, but it was popular at the show and I think it was eventually sold

Transformation

There are several other things in the pipeline that are along these same lines - I’ll post them when they’re finished

Now - in the good old days, I used to have no problems posting new designs here every week or 10 days - but that was when the things I did were a lot simpler! Today I work just as much on the designs, but the problem is that because they're becoming larger and more complicated, there's usually no way I can finish them off in just a week. So it's just not going to be possible to post as often as I once did, for which I'm very sorry - I really enjoy posting and reading readers' comments. But I'll still post whenever I can, and will keep on putting up free designs every few weeks, so I hope you'll know that I'm still here

It’s very strange but the first two blog readers to comment on yesterday’s free pigeon both said that if he were lonely, then all anyone had to do was to stitch him several times, and he’d have some companions

Well, if anyone actually wants to stitch a flock of pigeons, then the least I can do is to provide some of them! So here are two more from the same flock that will go with the first one

Two more for the flock

One word of warning - when I pass on designs to anyone I always stitch them out and watch carefully just to make sure that there are no glitches or problems with them. Of course I’ve stitched these two out, but as I never thought anyone else would be using them I may possibly have left one or two small mistakes in them. But even if I have, the quality of the final stitchouts should be OK

So HERE is number 2 and HERE is number 3, in .pes v6. As always, let me know if you can’t download them