Feeling Stitchy September Stitch Along

If you're familiar at all with my blog you'll know that I include embroidery in a lot of the stuff that I do.  I love the freedom that embroidery gives you to make any design you want a reality.

With that said I follow the Feeling Stitchy blog and every month they host a stitch along that I try to participate in when I can.  For September they had a halloween themed stitch along and considering that halloween is my all time favorite holiday (Christmas is of course a close second) I had to get in on this one.

The design was made by Cathy Gaubert and it's called Hallowe'en Trio.

To start I made a reverse copy of the image and traced over all the lines with my red transfer pencil.  My fabric of choice for embroidery is linen, so I pulled out a remnant of white linen I had laying around and transferred the design by laying it face down on my fabric and ironing with a hot iron.

I wanted to really make this embroidery "full", so I decided that each piece needed some sort of filler.

For the ghost I used a brown thread for the outline and a cream embroidery thread to fill in the body.  I don't know what technique I used to fill in the body since I made it up as I went, but I'm sure it does have a name.

This is it with the pencil lines still visible.  Once I hand washed the embroidery to remove all the lines it was much harder to see what was going on.

Here he is all cleaned up.  I loved the loopy handwriting on the "Spooky" sign and was careful while embroidering to make sure that I kept to it as closely as I could.

 The black cat is made entirely of french knots.  It took quite a bit of time and embroidery thread but the effect was well worth it.

 I used seed stitching on the Jack O Lantern.  I figured that if I filled it in completely it would be just a little overdone since the cat was filled in completely.

I'm pretty darn happy with how it turned out, and plan to make it into a mug rug or something similar for myself.

 I'm also looking forward to seeing what the Feeling Stitchy blog has planned for us in October.

If you're interested in seeing what the other participants made there's a Flickr group here.