Susan Bates - Designing the “Sun Shine Days” Patterns for StitchableCards

For my latest set of cross-stitch designs for Stitchable Cards I wanted to go for motifs that just shout out summertime, so I based them on sunflowers, as these beautiful, bold, bright yellow flowers do just that.

To begin, I put together a mood-board featuring some of my artwork, photos and previous cross-stitch sunflower designs, to set the tone of what I was after; this helps me to focus and pull together ideas.

Below:  My sunflower designs and illustrations from the past.

I wanted this set of designs to have a vibrant range of colours made up of sunshine yellows and rich golds for the sunflowers, with pretty greens for the leaves and stems of the sunflowers.

I’ve always liked the combination of yellow and blue, which you often see in Provencal designs, so I decided that I would add accents of blue to my designs and also to have a blue background on one of the designs.

My four designs:

Square shaped template:

For this  design I wanted to focus on a single, bold sunflower. The flower curves over and sits nicelyl in the sqaure shaped Stitchables template. In this version the background has been left unstitched, making it quick to sew.  A vibrant yellow banner with the sentiment ‘much love’ has been added, to personalise the design.

Rectangular shaped template:

The larger scale of the rectangular shaped template gave me scope to create a more complex design, so I created a bouquet of a couple of sunflowers and their accompanying green leaves. Dainty blue flowers dotted around the sunflowers.

Again, in the version show here, the background of the template is left unstitched, so that we can focus of the lovely yellow colours of the sunflowers.

A ‘thank you’ greeting is added in backstitch lettering, to make it into a sweet card.

Heart shaped template:

Moving away from a floral main motif I thought it would be sweet to have a butterfly in the centre of the heart shape

The symmetry of the butterfly works well in this shape and the yellows and blues echo the colours of the flowers in the other 3 designs.

The pale green background is sprinkled with little yellow flowers, to create a pretty stitched piece.

Circular template:

I thought that the circular shaped template lent itself well to having a single sunflower in it, due to the circular nature of the motif.

The background is stitched in a pale blue with little polka dots on it.

It makes a cute little design and would look lovely mounted onto a greetings card. You could even add some embellishments to it, or a cheerful phrase, to complete the happy, sunny, summery feeling.

I hope you enjoy these designs and have fun stitching them!