Creative Springtime Designs

May is my favourite time of the year. The sights, sounds and scents of nature are at their best. Any trip outdoors is greeted with birdsong, a pleasant temperature and sights of plants, flowers and the occasional butterfly that remind me of Springtime.

Perhaps you are inspired to recreate this feeling throughout the year by stitching a design that represents this beautiful time. The shapes, textures and colours of your design can be expressed  easily through the wide range of threads, yarns and fabrics easily available. Creativity does not come naturally to all of us, but any sort of expression in stitches can help to develop it.

Being creative will involve some practical skills as well as ideas. I personally have found the book Picture It in Cross Stitch Today by the late Jo Verso very helpful. It is especially good for those who do not wish to sit in front of a computer screen when they design. Jo describes the practicalities of getting your ideas into a paper design, and laying out the results to form  the exact results you want. It is particularly useful for the design of samplers or stitched scrapbook pages.

Another source of help and inspiration is the help available from the wonderful Jane Greenoff and her Cross Stitch Guild. If you click on the link to Stitchers’ Study, you will find an article on making your own charts (patterns) by Sue Hawkins and Jane Greenoff which shares meticulous details of how to transfer your own ideas into a cross stitch chart.

For those who wish to create a design from a picture or photograph, my favourite design software is called IStitch, and it comes (again) from Jane Greenoff. It is available from the Cross Stitch Guild. Not only does this program transfer your picture into a chart, but it labels the exact colours in the main brands of threads, which means that you know exactly the right colours to get going.

If you want to recreate Spring through stitches without creating your own design, then the easiest way is to choose a chart or kit made by an expert stitcher. The design will have been test-stitched by experienced professionals, so you will know that the finished result will look good. Here is a favourite of mine, designed by Mary Hickmott and available from Stitch Direct.