Berries are amazing right? Especially the self-grown ones. I started growing my own strawberries this year and I became kinda obsessed with them. But it’s a healthy obsession and no-one gets hurt, so I don’t see a problem with it. Quite the opposite, actually. Thanks for my small berry garden, I felt inspired to make a berry themed embroidery. Because of many things, I feel like the “the vibes are off” describes it quite nicely how I feel lately and I wanted to counter this with some berry good vibes.
I get a lot of peace and calmness from hand embroidery. This is one of the projects where I got the most satisfaction from the process itself. I enjoyed a lot making the design in Figma, but even more to sit down listen to some music and get lost in the stitches. Since things are recently not working out how I imagine them, I took my time with this one and enjoyed every single stitch of it.
While I like to technically challenge myself, I avoided complicated stitches on this one and sticked to the basics. The whole project only needed three stitches:
- The berry, leaves and steam are made with a whipped backstitch
- The berry details are wide lazy daisies
- And the letters are a chain stitch
I don’t think, it needs more. A whipped backstitch makes nice curves on the berry. Chain stitch is in my opinion anyways the best stitch for letters because it can catch intricate curves nicely and by stating a new line you can achieve very sharp edges.
The berry
I started stitching this project at the red part of the berry. A very bold and bright red felt right for this project. The outline of the berry is slightly curved, therefore I made the back stitches as small as possible. This way the curve stayed nice and smooth when I add the whipped stitches later.
For the details of the berry, I used a lazy daisy stitch. I’m not gonna lie, this felt weird to make. Usually lazy daisies are made slim and long to form flower petals, but this time I made them wide to form the triangles that resemble the tiny seeds in the berry.
After that I moved on to the green part. It didn’t go much different than the red outline, but I was much quicker since I was already in the flow and it’s also not really much work. At the top, where all the leaves meet, I payed attention to still finish all the lines until the end and not merge them. Otherwise, the leaves would look unfinished.
With the berry done it was time for a berry break 😉
The letters
I always find letters rather difficult to make. The tricky part of letters is that we have a very clear expectation how a letter looks like. If it is only a little bit off, it looks malformed or is not even readable. From the whole project, this probably took me the longest. I wanted to make sure all the stitches are in the right place and the letters look like they should.
With the letters done, the project is completed. I liked this project a lot! It lifted my mood drastically and the applied techniques are quite enjoyable.
Hope you feel inspired and wishing you berry good vibes 🍓
Want to make it yourself?
You can make this project yourself. Download the PDF below. It contains the pattern, colors and stitch map.
Enjoy and have fun!
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