Jewel Series: Amber, and what an embroidery draft looks like

Here's a little preview of the new series I'm currently working on! Also, let me show you the preliminary stage of developing a design, hehe.

I will not go too much into details today since this is just a heads-up, but I will try to outline the general idea!

Jewel Series is going to be a collection of floral designs which are inspired by miscellaneous gemstones. For the most part, it will be reflected in the color palettes but also there will be fancy golden-ish frames that underline the “jewel” status.

This is Amber!

You can see the color palette of the flower is full of yellows ranging from light to golden orange. The background fabric is also of dark green color and it adds the “earthy” vibe to the design. Even though it might be hard to see because of how my camera is resistant to catch the actual color, *sigh*. But dark green it is, I swear.

In this design, the flower itself is rather small, but it is almost all worked in long and short stitch. So it is going to be a great practice for those of you who want to get into needlepainting but are still afraid of large-scale projects.

Besides, I'm making sure to include as many step-by-step pictures of the long and short stitching as possible, so that you feel more comfortable having all the visual support you need!

All in all, I plan to expand this collection to 7 designs. The gemstones that the flowers will be based on are already decided. I wonder if you can guess which ones? :)

But since seven flowers is a pretty big number, and I have other ideas that I want to try, the designs are divided into 3 pairs and 1 more individual “Jewel”.

Amber and her sister are the first pair. Then, after I'm done with some other ideas, I will start with the next pair, and so on :)

Embroidery draft

Speaking of Amber's sister! Here you can have a glance at my embroidery draft where I tried out the colors for the flowers.

This is the color palette for the next flower. Already have ideas on which gemstone is based on? :)

By the way, when I worked these... weird shapes, that only bear some resemblance with flowers, I did the long and short stitching in a very relaxed way. I didn't make my goal to necessarily cover the fabric in the most solid way, as it is supposed to be with this stitch, but rather to just see how the colors match. So you can actually see glimpses of dark peeking through between the stitches because I didn't really try hard to lay them very close to each other.

And you know what, I really like how it looks, haha. It has some kind of soft and sheer feeling. It's hard to explain, and it might be impossible to feel that from a photograph, but yeah, there is something in it.

So, what I mean is that... if you are afraid of long and short stitching because it is too much hard work... why don't you try working it like this? I literally scrambled this draft in one evening exactly because I didn't take it way too seriously.

I think as long as you keep the direction of stitches consistent, this way of needlepainting can be just as pretty! I'm even thinking of stitching something new using exactly this relaxed way, hehe.

Well, that's all for now! Please, look forward to the official post about the new series! :)