Patterns: Birds of Prey

Sublime Stitching has recently released a new .pdf only pattern sheet, 'Birds of Prey' (you need to be registered with Sublime Stitching and log in, to be able to see the pattern). I had a great time stitching the whole pattern sheet up as a cushion this week, I tried to keep the colours as close as possible to the real thing, so it was fun searching google for pictures of different birds of prey.

I particularly enjoyed stitching the vulture and the bald eagle; I stitched the vulture first and wasn't too sure about the use of white floss for the bird's chest feathers against my white fabric, so when it came to stitching the bald eagle, I blended two strands of white floss with one strand of black (as shown in Jenny Hart's floss blending tutorial here) for the white feathers and I was a lot happier with the effect.

I think a lot of the designs on the sheet would look great on their own on country and western style clothing. When stitching up these patterns it made me think a lot about stitching on denim or gingham (I think the bald eagle would look particularly good on gingham, filled in with satin stitch). So I will definitely be stitching these designs again!

For those wanting an immediate, free fix of some Birds of Prey; Sublime Stitching has also released a free sample of the design over on Flickr, the owl design.