Embroidered Pincushion

 I really enjoy hand embroidery, but I don't particularly like doing big embroidery projects; I tend to save my "big project energy" for art quilts.  But I love having a small embroidery project going at any given time, and one of my favorite embroidery blogs is run by Mary Corbett over at Needle N Thread.  She's been running a series of small stitch-along projects.  They're great because she walks through each step, and then the project finishes into something useful.  

Recently she led a stitch-along to make a bejeweled beaded pincushion.  You can see all the posts about the project here.  Mary sold kits for the project but I wanted to use things I had on hand so I sort of adapted it a little for my materials.

The main embroidery is on the side panel that wraps around the pincushion with a little additional fun hexagonal stitching along the top.  I had to put it in a fairly large hoop because the part that wraps around the pincushion is pretty wide and because it's beaded you can't really move the hoop.  Someday maybe I'll invest in a nice rectangular frame, but not just now.

I love Mary's stitch tutorials, she provides so many details so it's easy to learn how to do the stitches properly.  I don't always manage it, but it's not for lack of instruction.   

After stitching all the stems, I stitched a few thread flowers and then started stitching the beads.  I haven't done much beading before so that was one of the things I liked about this project. I had wanted to use all supplies I had on hand, but the project called for tiny 11/0 seed beads.  I have a variety of 15/0 seed beads, but they really looked too big on here.  I found a great local bead store and picked up a couple of different shades of blue and pink beads.

After assembling the pincushion, there is a row of palestrina stitch around the top and bottom edge.  That was a new stitch to me and it was wonderful to have instructions for both left and right handed stitchers.  The palestrina stitch was fun and it was good to have a chance to practice it. 

I love the way it turned out.  I took it slowly, stitching on it a little here and there when I had time, and it was fun to have it finish into something I think is so pretty at the end.  I assembled it a little differently than in the instructions because I wanted to stuff it with walnut shell crumbles.  It has a piece of matboard inside the base which makes it nice and sturdy feeling.

It feels a little old-fashioned in a delightful way.  It was a great low-stress enjoyable project.  If you like embroidery, I recommend you follow Needle N Thread.