With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, you’re probably thinking you don’t have time to stitch up something festive for your sweetie.
And, to tell you the truth, you could be right, if you were planning to go All Out in a Big-Hearted Way.
But, if you just want to go small, there’s plenty of time between now and next Wednesday, right?
Here’s a free hand embroidery pattern to get the juices flowing and get you motivated to give it a go! I’ll even give you some stitching ideas to go along with it – because I love you, of course!
On the free printable for this embroidery pattern (lined to below), there are actually two hearts, because two hearts are always better than one!
One is a 3.5″ high heart, and the other a 4.5″ heart. That way, if you want to go a little bigger or a little smaller, you can do that without having to scale the pattern.
Stitch Ideas
The rather hairy-looking design (which will not look hairy once it’s stitched!) is super suitable for very simple stitches – which means it will work up relatively quickly, with not a lot of stitching stress.
If you want to go for a nice light, delicate look, the vines would work up great in split stitch or in stem stitch. The little heart shaped flowers? Why, daisy stitch, of course – but you could also use granitos.
When I doodled up the hearts in today’s pattern, I had in mind an approach similar to the heart monograms in Will Ewe Bee Mine?, which is an e-book I put out last year that features an alphabet with three different motifs: hearts, bees, and sheep.
Step-by-step stitch instructions and floral and vine variations are all in there, so those of you who have the e-book are all set! You can adapt the techniques and apply them to the heart pattern.
Color Choices
With vine things, I always find that a good approach to stems, especially if I want to keep things rather light and natural looking, is to combine two threads in the needle at once – perhaps a variegated brown and a variegated green, with variegations that run from medium to light in shade.
Then, with the floral elements, you can always make the piece pop with brighter elements, or you could stick to the lighter, delicate look and use softer and lighter shades.
If you work the design on a natural or colored ground fabric – like a dark natural or something similar – try incorporating white into you floral elements or maybe into some small sprays or specks of French knots scattered here and there along the vine. On colored ground fabrics, white brightens things up quite nicely.
That’s what I did here with the sheep monogram from Will Ewe Bee Mine:
How much or how little you sprinkle French knots in among your vines is up to you. I think I went a little overboard on the sheep monogram, but that’s what happens when I start adding French knots!
Blooming Hearts Free Embroidery Pattern
The link below will open the PDF printable for Blooming Hearts, and then you can save it to your own computer and print it as you need to. Choose no scaling or 100% on your printer options when you print, and the designs should print for you at 3.5″ and 4.5″ high.
Blooming Hearts Hand Embroidery Pattern (PDF)
Looking for More Hearts & Such?
You can find Will Ewe Bee Mine?, featuring a fun floral alphabet with three different motifs (hearts, sheep, and bees) and all the materials lists, patterns, and step-by-step stitching instructions right here in my shop.
You can find plenty of other free hand embroidery patterns right here on Needle ‘n Thread, too.
Heartsy designs include this exuberant flower-filled heart (you can see a gorgeous stitched example of it here); this very simple scalloped heart; and this L-O-V-E in a Box design.
Hope you have a swell weekend! This weekend, I’m marathon stitching on a little project, a “small” that has a very special purpose, which I will tell you about very soon!
