happy june 2024! our newest pattern is this lovely lady, the peacock plant. (honestly the calatheas are my fussiest houseplants, but they're so striking that i usually forgive them.) i'm excited to stitch this one up!

i'm showing it here in a 6" hoop so you can see the correct placement - the bottom of the pot and the ege of the leaf on the right extend all the way up to the hoop - but i'm going to be using a 7" hoop for the stitching, so that i have some extra space around the design. once i'm done stitching, i'll frame it in a 6" hoop, as always.

now, to begin, i am starting simple and easy with back stitch outlines [2 strands] for all these dark green lines.
here we go!

and once the outline of each leaf is done, i'm going to be using brick stitch [2 strands] to fill in the shaded areas of the leaves, and also the stems and midribs:

stitch by stitch...

ok, now i'm finally done with the leaves, and i'm moving on to the pot.
i've outlined it with back stitch [2 strands] and i'm filling in the wonky rectangles with satin stitch [2 strands].

you can see here that i'm orienting the stitches lengthwise (though widthwise would also be fine).

(i didn't really need to outline the bottom edge, since that will be tucked into the hoop when i frame it later.)

there's one final part of this pattern to stitch, and that's the blue background of the pot.
i am using satin stitch for this [2 strands], and i'm orienting all of my stitches vertically:

it's hard to explain this next part, but hopefully you can see it better than i can explain it:

i'm making little sections of satin stitch that fit in between the red blocks, from the center of one red block to the center of the one below it (almost like bricks or subway tile).

since the red blocks are irregular, i just improvised where i had to, and filled in any stray areas with more satin.

if that doesn't make sense, please know that you can do whatever you want here! get creative and do your thing.

here we are, all done!

and here's the back side, just for fun:

 look for the complete kit and preprint for 'peacock plant' in september!