Embroidered Dragonfly #2: Design & Materials

Good morning and Happy Friday! Yay! It’s the workend!

I have lots of dabbling to finish up this weekend so that we can explore some other stitching ideas in the near future. So I’m not thinking in terms of weekend these days. Fortunately, I love my work!

But in the meantime, I thought it might be a good idea to continue with the final part of our Embroidered Dragonflies series, by presenting the design and materials list for the second dragonfly.

Now that we’ve learned to embroider a dragonfly – we finished the first dragonfly in this tutorial here – I thought it would be a good idea to place a dragonfly in a setting of sorts.

A bug all alone is all well and fine. But bugs don’t really exist in a void. Design-wise, it’s always nice to give an alive thing some context, I think.

For some background context for this particular dragonfly, I wanted to go light and airy and delicate.

To mix things up, the second dragonfly will a new color scheme, too.

Printable Design

Here’s the PDF for easy printing of this design:

Embroidered Dragonflies: Dragonfly #2

The design should print at about 6.5″ high and 3.5″ wide. When you print the PDF, choose “actual size” in your printer dialog box.

Materials List for Dragonfly #2

Fabric: My sample of Dragonfly #2 is embroidered on the same linen as the first dragonfly – Glass Linen, which is semi-sheer with a fine, open weave. You can substitute any fabric you want to stitch on!

Threads:

DMC stranded cotton: #35 (somewhat of an eggplant purple); 469 (green); 772 (very light green)

Accentuate in 313

Au Ver a Soie Metallic braid #4 in colors 2829 and 042.

Au Ver a Soie silk: Soie de Paris #2125 (you can substitute DMC 469)

Beads:

Mill Hill Medium Buble Beads 82045 (Willow green)

Miyuki 11/0 round seed in opaque purple rainbow iris

6/0 round seed beads in a dark purple (from a TOHO design mix called “Purple Passion” from Art Beads – substitute any 6/0 seed bead that works, color-wise)

Mill Hill Magnifica 10014

Substitutions!

If you followed the first tutorial, you’ll notice that some of the supplies listed above overlap. If you have supplies from the first dragonfly, you’ll have some of the colors and threads already.

But chances are, you’ll have to make substitutes. Since I’m working from my stash, I just pulled materials that fit the look I was trying to achieve. You can substitute for all of the above! You might wait to see the finished design, and then decide if you want to stitch it and what colors and materials you’d use to make yours unique.

Looking for More?

You can find all the tutorials for this series in the How to Embroider (Blank) Index here. Besides all the articles that take you step-by-step through Dragonfly #1, you’ll find tutorials on how to embroider wheat, strawberries, daisies, and grapes. These projects all happened in 2021 – it was a fun year!

If you’re a member of the Needle ‘n Thread community on Patreon, you’ll find all the tutorials available as downloadable PDFs. I’ll be posting the tie-ups on all the dragonfly tutorials in one PDF very soon! I’m dedicating this morning to finishing that up!

Coming Up!

We’ll finish the dragonflies for good next week. I’ll show you the finish of this version and share some stitching tips and ideas for this design.

Then, Thanksgiving!! We’ll have a little Thanksgiving Eye-Spy for 2021, so watch for that on Thursday!

I’ll be taking the rest of Thanksgiving weekend off. I have family and friends coming in for the holiday, and it promises to be a jolly time all around! So after I pop in with the Thanksgiving Eye-Spy, I’ll bow out for the weekend.

Then the party begins with this year’s Stitcher’s Christmas series starting December 1st. This is a series of pre-Christmas give-aways that I usually run here on Needle ‘n Thread as Christmas approaches. It’s a fun opportunity full of delectable needlework goodies!

Most likely you will see some regular blog posts scattered among the give-aways this year. There are just so many little things I still want to show you before the New Year flips over. Plus, I’m gearing up for 2022, and it’s getting exciting. I probably won’t be able to keep my mouth shut about ideas for the coming year.

Have a swell weekend! I’ll see you next week!