Gingham Hearts

This kit came from one of those British cross-stitching magazines, I forget which.  The instructions had one cross stitching on the gingham (duh), but I thought I'd try some chicken scratch stitching, which I learned about from Alicia Paulson's Embroidery Companion (a great book, by the way).

Only, I didn't take into account how tiny this gingham is -- at least sixteen squares per inch, when most chicken scratch is done on 1/4 inch or 1/8 inch gingham.  I used just one strand of floss and spent a lot of time with the hoop just a few inches from my face.  Three of Paulson's diamond motifs created too tiny a heart, so I expanded the design using this heart pattern (that site also has some info about this style of embroidery).

The effect of the loop stitches is pretty neat; there's a reason why this stitch is also called Depression Lace or Amish Lace.  I recommend a Flickr search to see all sorts of nifty patterns.

For the second heart I took the easy way out and just sewed on some pink seed beads:

The resulting texture is great, and fun to play with.

The hearts, all sewn up:

The chicken-scratch one came out kind of lumpy and misshapen, because the not-high-quality fabric slid around while I was sewing it.  For the beaded heart I basted the fabric to the felt backing first, and that worked much better.  In both cases, I forgot to sew in the ribbon hangers, so I had to tack those on later.