Snowflake Mandala: Winter inspired embroidery freebie

Hi! How are you feeling? Hope this season is going easy on you and you're able to find time and place to relax and enjoy some simple things. As one of the ways to treat yourself, I'm going to suggest some winter-inspired stitching!

This pattern was supposed to appear on the blog earlier, but my slow self was able to complete the design only yesterday! But better later than never, right?

Anyway, here's a cute lil snowflake mandala you can embroider to celebrate the winter! Personally, I used a small hoop as a frame for it and then took a string of twine to make a loop for hanging it. It became a real wall-candy, I'm not even lying, it does look pretty!

Now, I have to warn you that the pattern is simplistic enough and leaves you a lot of room for improvisation with stitches and techniques you want to try. What I mean is, I don't provide there directions for satin stitch or the grids – all of that was my own improvisation on the pattern as I was stitching it and I didn't add anything to the pattern after completing it.

The reason I didn't make any corrections and left it simple was that I thought you might want to try stitch it differently than me? And honestly, I do think that this design can be embroidered in many ways.

One of the options is to work the whole of the design with one of the line stitches: back stitch, stem stitch or split stitch. I think it would actually look really cool! You could also add some vibrancy by using colorful threads to stitch it.

As for me, I stopped at the monochrome option, haha. Actually, I was myself thinking of working it in a calm pastel palette, but it didn't turn out as I wanted so I decided to redo quickly.

Frankly speaking, if you have doubts about which colors to use when embroidering a design – just pull out the “whitework” card and you are safe! Whitework works on ALL occasions. Trust me. I am yet to see a design which wouldn't look nice in white.

Of course, it is not a classic example of whitework as it is stitched on a grey cotton fabric, but the main thing is that it looks pretty! For the ornament, I prefer the snowflake to pop up from the background. If I stitched it in white on a white background it would have a lacey effect which wasn't exactly what I was aiming for. However, if you want, why not explore this option?

In my version of the snowflake you can find such stitches as lazy daisy, stem stitch, split stitch as a filler for the leaves, satin stitch, and also grids as a filling of two petals of the flowers.

I'm really looking forward to all the beautiful versions of this design that you will stitch!

So, here's your link to download:

DOWNLOAD THE PATTERN HERE

In this season when we are so busy running and preparing for the holidays, stitching a mandala like that can be a soothing and relaxing experience... I can even allow a cup of warm tea or hot chocolate while embroidering, just be careful to not put any stains on your work!