Needlepainting for Beginners: Story of Peony

Read on for a sneak peek behind the scenes of the final project for the course :)

The Needlepainting for beginners e-course that I'm planning to launch this month is heavily focused on long and short stitching exercises. But working only exercises can feel tedious and boring and even though I tried to make the shapes and elements pretty enough, it is still not something many of us would gladly put on the wall.

That's why I developed this project. To close the course with elegance and class 😉.

UPDATE: The course is launched! Enroll now

And before you see its finished look, I decided to give you a little behind-the-scenes sneak peek and tell you about the process of developing a design.

I actually already covered this topic once in another blog post. But every design is born in a unique way and there is always some special story to tell.

Now it's time for the story of Peony :)

Peony's inspiration was the watercolor drawing that I showed in one of the previous posts. I really liked how it turned out and wondered how it will look when stitched (yes, yes, I very often look at drawings, illustrations and, frankly speaking, anything at all and think of how it would look like embroidered on fabric...).

So when it was time to develop a project for the course, Peony still didn't want to leave my mind and I decided to try and adapt it for the course.

In the upper corner of the image above you can see the stitched draft that helped a lot in understanding how this piece could potentially look like.

After countless fruitless attempts to find close enough colors for the smaller flowers or changing their colors to something else that would satisfy me, they had to be sacrificed and leave the pattern.

It was a weird experience, sitting for few hours under the window trying to find THE thread and working these small flowers over and over again. I guess their destiny is to exist only on watercolor paper.

Since the small flowers left the pattern there was a need for further changes to balance the new empty space.

I also needed to change the sepala because it was too small in the drawing. And the leaves that were actually not typical for peonies but were just something I drew out of my head without any reference.

After tweaking the drawing here and there I left the Peony blossom and changed completely the leaves. You can see the sketch in the left corner.

What I like the most about this design is that it is flexible for any stitcher. If you consider the full pattern a bit too difficult, you can erase the upper leaves and stitch only the lower ones. Or you can stitch only the Peony flower – it will only require to continue a line. Or maybe you will want to embroider only leaves without the flower.

It is possible to adapt it for your level of eagerness and confidence without making it an ordeal for you :)