In what feels like a re-occuring theme on this blog, I have once again failed to find a pattern that did what I was looking for and so decided to make the pattern myself.
This time I was looking for a night sky themed needlepoint and none of the patterns actually matched what I was looking for. In the end I decided to make the pattern above, and while it is a little rough around the edges I think it’s a good start. The part of the pattern that gave me the most problems is the sun in the upper left corner, and I’ve identified the three main issues as the pattern transfer, the color, and the stitch tension.
For the transfer the main issue is that I have been using a window and sunlight to help me transfer the pattern to the fabric. While this is great because it’s free, for large / complex patterns the longer it takes to trace, the greater chance the fabric will move or shift, causing a problem with the transfer. Equally frustrating is that while I have a pale tracing pen to make it easy to see the pattern on the fabric, the marks fade quickly so it can be hard to find the trace. I think I’ve figured out the first part of the issue as I finally managed to get my hand on a tracing light pad, which should allow me to get the pattern transferred without straining my arms. There isn’t anything that can really fix the second issue, since I don’t want the lines to stay on the fabric. I may just have to see if I can do the pattern more quickly.
The color of the sun it going to take the most time to sort out, mostly because of the limited space. Since I am doing long and short stitches I can only get so many colors into the sun, which makes the color change rough and jarring. I may have to give up on having multiple colors in the pattern and just stick with shades of red, orange, or yellow. It’s not what I was hoping for, but other than making the sun in the pattern much larger so that I can fit in more colors there isn’t really another option. I will have to do some color checks later on to see which of the the three color gradients will look best.
Finally, when it comes to stich tension this is something that will likely just come with more experience. You can see it in other parts of the pattern, places where the fabric puckers more than it should from where the stitches are pulling on the fabric. Unfortunately there is no easy fix for this other than just getting better at doing embroidery, but that’s the idea behind practice makes perfect. I’m going to have to be more consciecios of how much my stitches are pulling on the fabric going forward.
I will say that I was very proud of my stars and the (very basic) beadwork I did in the pattern. For the stars, I looked up multiple different ways to embroider a star and just put the options I liked most into the pattern. The beadwork is likewise pretty simple but I’ve been wanting to start using beadwork in embroidery before now, so this is the first little baby step in that direction.
I will likely end up re-making this pattern again once I have more needle point experience. I really like the pattern, and if I can get the tension and color transition for the sun right I think it will look really good. I may need to pull back on the stars, as much as I like them there may be too many stars in the pattern and they do make the pattern look busy. We’ll see how I feel when we revisit the pattern later to make it again.
