Unicorn Embroidery Finished (kinda) and why I love Pinterest

here's the wide shot:

The light in my dining room is terrible, this is after much colour/contrast manipulation and it's the best I can get.... nevermind... as the title suggests it's not quite done yet. The embroidery is done, but I'm going to make it into a frilly pillow ^.^ so there will be other photo ops.

Let me tell you the story of this embroidery, before I show you the close-ups.
If you haven't heard me talk about it before, I need to impress upon you the wonderfulness of pintrest for cataloguing the inspiration you find peppered across the internet. If you've got a wist, it's like a wist on speed! you get multiple 'pinboards' to save links on, the links are organised in a pleasing visual way. For me the real strength is that the original source of the 'pin' never gets lost* This is great for me as a blogger (nothing more frustrating than finding an AWESOME idea and not knowing who to credit it to) but it's also great for all kids of creative people who use the Internet to earn a living, as the 'pins' to their blog/etsy are like Hansel and Gretel-esque breadcrumbs leading the consumer to their shopfront.

*hmmm... there ARE some teething problems were you click to access the original source of the image and you get directed round and round to the same 'pin'. Also sometimes you get a very frustrating error message saying that their servers are too busy and to try again later. But I'm hoping these *are* just teething problems and will end as the site grows.


Anyhow... unicorns...

I saw this on Craftster:

I loved the idea, but I don't do cross stitch, so I pinned it to my crafty inspiration board on Pinterest. Nice, tidied away so I can refer back to it later and say Thankyou to Minathia and SanDorfALot for giving me the initial idea for my embroidery.

I saw this on Pinterest, it was pinned by someone I follow and so showed up in my 'news feed':

Because Pinterest is awesome I know that this embroidery pattern was offered free on www.sunshineandcarousels.blogspot.com when the writer of www.mygirlthursday.com wrote a guest blog post. See? no plagiarism! shiny! I can also let My Girl Thursday know that her pattern enabled me to make my work, which hopefully will make her feel good :-)

So I knew that these 2 ideas would go together... but I wanted something else... I google imaged 'embroidery borders' and found this:

and - of course - I pinned it to my embroidery pinboard for future use.

And a bit of editing later I came up with this:

and then I freehanded the corners in, cos I'm a ninja.

now,  lets look see some work in progress pics and then my close ups!

So that pink flower fabric is fused to the backing fabric with bondaweb, double sided fusible interfacing.
The hair is made from row on row of tight, small chain stitches, following a rainbow pattern :-)

see? the pattern was transferred using carbon paper... in retrospect I should have chosen a different method because the carbon paper ink was REALLY hard to remove (actually I can still see it *shakes fist*)

 That's a 12" hoop btw :-)

























And now the final piece with close ups:

I had to wash it quite aggressively because the ink from the carbon paper WOULD NOT GO! so some stitches have wandered, particularly the blanket stitches around the love heart applique.











Boring needlework details for other threadheads:

Everything was worked in 2 strands of embroidery floss

Red: DMC 999, Orange: mystery non-brand, Yellow: Anchor 297, Green: mystery non-brand, Blue: Anchor 143, Purple: DMC 718

The unicorn hair is small, tight, chain stitch worked in rows, the outline is backstitch, and the heart applique is outlined in blanket stitch.

The border is worked with loose chain stitch (red and green) lazy daisy stitch (orange and inner red) oversize lazy daisy stitch - with couching to hold the loops in place (blue and red corner pieces)

I will, of course, answer questions/help people who want to make their own version of this, but, you can youtube terms like 'couching' and 'lazy daisy'... so don't ask me for individual stitch tutorials :-) thanks.

Well... I think that'll do for now...
get back to you with more pictures when I've made it up into a cushion :-)

x GS