Moonlight forest

I finished a new embroidery pattern! They say foxes have some fey in them, stitch up this pattern and lead a little magic into your life. Moon foxes look great stitched on midnight blue fabric, or try out whatever colors tickle your fancy. This is also a great pattern to try out that sparkly metallic floss.

If you look closely, you can see some of the different stitches I used this time. That's the Split Stitch around the moon and dark part of the trees, Back Stitch and Straight Stitches on some of the details like lines on the moon, stars and those extra, lighter lines on the trees.

The foxes are filled in solidly with the Long and Short Stitch, and I thought I'd give you little tutorial on this handy little technique.

Here's how it's done: Just stitch a row of one long, then one short stitches along the edge of your pattern. Then, in the next row beneath them, make your stitches all the same length until the area is filled. 

In theory, this is how the Long and Short stitch works, but unless you're just filling in squares, you'll need to tweak it a bit to fit your needs, and that's fine! If you take a look at these foxes, you can see how I changed the direction of the stitches to fit the shape of their bodies.

Changing your stitch directions helps give a lot of dimension to your filled-in shapes. You can see in the fox below, his body, tail and head are stitched mostly horizontally, with stitches bending to follow the curve of his tail. His legs are stitches at diagonal angles, which helps them stand out from the body, and look more like legs. 

 You can find my new Moonlight Forest pattern at my shop: www.littledear.etsy.com, it's available for instant download when you purchase! I hope you'll enjoy stitching this one as much as I did. 

Also, be sure to check out my other embroidery tutorials along the left side of my blog there.  I bet you'll find something useful! 

Happy stitching!

xo aimee