Last week, I introduced you to the embroidery design work of Lilly Baróthi Zathureczky and told you a little bit of Lilly’s life story. Today, I’d like to share with you another one of her designs!

It’s hard for me to pick “favorites” from the various designs she drew – I find all of them enchanting in some aspect or another. On this particular design, I love her choice of colors, the somewhat delicate floral and swash that makes up the interior circular design, and I like the wavy edge around the perimeter. (In fact, what’s not to like about it?!)

Just like the Golden Circle pattern (the first Hungarian embroidery design in this series), this one is suitable for traditional Hungarian folk embroidery techniques, but it is also adaptable to all kinds of other embroidery techniques – whitework, goldwork, blackwork, silk…. there are heaps of possibilities for adaptations! An enlarged version of the design would work well for a tea cloth (a small table cloth – maybe 25″ – 28″ square), and a smaller version (for example, 14″ square) would work well for a doily or decorative linen for the center of a table. The design could also be worked as a pillow, or, very small, as a decorative insert for the top of a box.

Here’s a picture of Lilly from 1932 – looking young, idealistic, and adventurous! At this time in her life, she was traveling with her father throughout Europe and beginning to develop a portfolio of designs that were mostly embroidery related. If you’d like to read a brief sketch of her life, you can find it with the first Hungarian embroidery pattern posted in this series, the Golden Circle.

This is the line drawing of the design above. I’ve restricted the lines to the areas of color where Lilly drew her original outlines, but there are some parts of the design where you can definitely add other guidelines for stitching. For example, in this close-up of the main motif in the design, I drew in some extra lines, in red:

In the folk embroidery of Hungary, many of the design elements are split into these elongated petal shapes, which are stitched either with either satin stitch or buttonhole stitch, so dividing different parts of the design like this would not be too unusual.

For printing, here’s the PDF version of today’s design. It will definitely need enlarging if you plan to work it as a doily, or even more so if you plan to work it for the center of a tea cloth. Any copy center can help you get a good enlargement, if you are unable to do so on your home printer.

Hungarian Embroidery Design #2: Floral Square (PDF)

Finally, a request: if you do happen to make use of any of Lilly’s designs for your embroidery (or other craft) projects, I’d love to see a photo of what you do with them, and so that your work can be a part of the collection of Lilly’s Legacy.

Thanks again to Mike Parr and Guy Brassard for sharing Lilly’s Legacy!