— whollyKao

pine cone crafts

Last weekend when I was home in Boston, I took an embroidery project with me. I brought my quintessential Autumn book, The Cider House Rules, but thought I might get bored. So I brought the needle & thread.

With my favorite season of Autumn in full swing, I thought it’d be appropriate to embroider some pine cones. I had planned to do two of these, but only had time for one. I guess I’ll have to post the second one later, after I’m done with it.

How to make your own
Supplies
-pine cone image
-carbon paper
-needle
-thread
-fabric, ironed
-embroidery hoop
-a good station on Pandora to rock out to while working on this

 
Step 1
Find your pine cone image. It’s best to find a simple line drawing (or create your own). That way, your embroidery project doesn’t take forever. I googled pine cone sketch and found these. (feel free to use them if you want!)

Step 2
Print your pine cone image out at the size you’re going to embroider it. Put the paper on top of the carbon paper, and put them both on top of your fabric, so that the carbon paper is sandwiched between the paper with the pine cone image and the fabric. Carefully trace the image out with a pen, making sure you get all the lines.
By the way, using carbon paper was SO much easier than cutting out my image like I did for the mattieHeartMoonie project. I learned my lesson.

Step 3
Slip your cloth onto an embroidery hoop. The one I used was 3″ in diameter. Now you’re ready to start stitching.

Step 4
Stitch. Follow the lines you drew on the fabric. It’s ok to fudge this a little. Just make sure that your stitches cover up the ‘ink’ marks on the cloth. To do mine, I used four strands of thread, and did a back stitch.

Step 5
Add accent color. After I was done, I decided to add a bit of yellow accent color. It’s kind of subtle. I just added stitches of yellow color where I saw fit. And then I was done!

I think it’d be really fun to make a set of these in many colors and hang them in a row on the wall. I’m thinking royal blue with lime green as the accent color. Or plum with gray accents. Make it Warholesque, if you will. Those colors would show up better than the subtle yellow here. Hm, maybe that’s something I’ll tackle when I get a moment.