Bloomin’ Marvellous : 1

The weather’s turned, leaves are falling and winter is on its way – to the northern hemisphere at any rate. So I’ve decided to design another series of free embroidery patterns while stuck indoors for the next few months.

The theme is a bloomy one, although loosely interpreted, because the real blooms have faded and flowery designs are just fun to stitch. I’ve picked my fabric – white cotton and textured Irish linen – and a variety of muted, but light coloured six-stranded DMC threads and Mill Hill glass embroidery beads.


The design process will be quite different compared with the way I did the Jacobean Leaves, in that I’m going to post patterns as I design instead of finishing the entire project first. Two reasons for this: I don’t know what the finished article is yet, and it’ll be more spontaneous and creative this way.

It won’t be entirely random, though, as each design will fit neatly into a 4x4" square, or about 10x10cm. So the plan is to end up with a stack of embroidered squares to make up into… something. I’m going to stick to embroidering on white, because I have that piece of soft white cotton that needs embellishing, and I’ll decide where the linen comes into it once all the white blocks have been embroidered. As for how many blocks, well, that depends on how many ideas pop into my head. I’m aiming for somewhere between 12 and 24.

These are the DMC threads that I’ve chosen: 815, 816, 920, 3854, 727, 3078, 3857, 3858, 3859, 3722, 224, 407, 3860, 435, 434, 598, 931, 924, 3768, 503, 927, 3363, 3052, 3364, 522, 469, 772 and 938. But in the spontaneous spirit of this project, I may decide to add another one or two or not use some of these colours along the way. But this is the basic palette I’ll be using and I’ll put the DMC colour numbers on to each pattern in case you like the same shades.

So without further ado, here’s Bloomin’ Marvellous 1:


Download the pattern here.

What colour is your DNA?

I’m in the process of coming up with a new project and find myself once again choosing threads from the same palette that I subconsciously draw from each and every time, albeit slightly different tones this time round.


My favourite red DMC embroidery thread is number 816, for example. More often than not, it’s the shade I’ll pull out of my floss box first when a design calls for red. It’s also one of MTMs regular reds. And neither of us is overly fond of pastels, or pinks and purples. Although we both like dusty shades of those colours.

It got me to thinking: Is colour preference hereditary? Do I prefer certain colours because my parents and their parents before them are (or were) genetically predisposed to those colours? Are these preferences built into my DNA? Or do I choose them simply because I’m used to seeing them and they’ve become a bit of a habit?

As one does, I turned to Google for insight. But I didn’t find out much on the subject. There are studies on colour preferences between the sexes – one found that women tend to gravitate towards the red end of the red-green spectrum more than men, and both sexes choose blue more often than yellow – but I couldn’t find anything straightforward regarding hereditary predisposition to certain hues, tints, shades and tones of the colour spectrum. And I like yellow just as much as blue, sometimes more depending on the shade.

The more I stitch, the more defined my palette becomes. I add to it constantly, but more often than not with shades and tones of the same basic colours to which I’m instinctively drawn. I’m presuming this is (or was) the same for MTM, my gran, her mom and so on up my maternal family tree of stitchers. So if we do inherit our colour preferences, I guess mine are pretty much set in stone – or should I say, my DNA.

Going out with a bang, stitched up or in a puff of smoke

I spent an afternoon at the British Museum recently, primarily to see the display of Chinese ceramics. But it’s the Ghanaian coffins that have stuck with me.

Local carpenters can shape and paint your coffin to resemble absolutely anything – there’s even a camera coffin in the museum’s collection. A search online unearthed everything from Mercs (the favoured car in Africa) to fish to cellphones to aeroplanes to pineapples. One man’s love of smoking made him choose a cigarette coffin, a sort of fly in the face of adversity deathbed gesture. But my favourite has to be this one:


I’ve entertained the notion of foregoing a coffin and being cremated in my favourite quilt, but haven’t been able to get my head around wasting a good quilt like that. Perhaps I could get a friendly Ghanaian carpenter to carve me a wooden version instead…