Spooky stitching

 Hello everyone!

I hoped to have this post up on Halloween, but that didn't happen so you can have it on Day of the Dead instead. I have been managing quite a bit of spooky stitching over the last week or so.

I finished a little cross-stitch kit! It took me less than an hour. I think it's pretty cute. I'm pretty sure there's enough spare thread to make a second one, as well.

And my Halloween La Passacaglia has been making some good progress.  Three of my large rosettes have definitely grown.

Here's the biggest purple one. If you compare it to my previous post, you can see the difference.

Here's the other purple one. It has just had the outer purple triangle shapes added.

And here's one of the orange ones. This one had only the 5 orange centre diamonds done previously.

I really like the star effect with this last one, I am almost tempted to make a whole quilt of this star shape, appliquéd onto squares. Not that I need another idea to add to my mental future quilt list.

However, picking this up again has reminded me of the reason why it stalled.  The overall effect is meant to be of the four large colourful rosettes blooming from a monochrome background.  And I don't have enough different fabrics to make it work. In particular, I need more fussy-cuttable Halloween fabrics that read white.  I am doing my best with the ones I have, this fabric has been thoroughly Swiss-cheesed getting a variety of different fussy-cuts out of it, and I will probably squeeze some more out of it:

But I need more, and rather annoyingly, it doesn't seem to exist. These are my criteria:
- white (or slightly off-white) background with detail in black, orange and/or purple only
- the right scale to fussy cut in pentagons and/or long thin diamonds
- not too cutesy and not too gory
- not licensed fabric (no Nightmare Before Christmas or Walking Dead, for example)
- ideally be different to what I've got already, so no more bats, cats, skulls/skeletons, ghosts or pumpkins.

Which is pretty specific! I am looking into designing my own on Spoonflower, but there are a couple of problems there. One is that Spoonflower prints tend to not be good at deep saturated colour, so this is not a solution if I want any more orange/purples. It would work fine for monochrome stuff, but the problem there is - I need a lot of practice before I can turn out a drawing that is even vaguely usable. I am good at sketching geometric shapes on graph paper, but much less good at free-hand drawing.  At least that's a problem I can actually work on.

In the meantime, I have identified a few other parts of the La Pass that I can work on with what I've got already. It's not like this is going to be finished quickly, so I can hope that some workable fabrics will be revealed to me over the next few months.

Thanks for reading!