Hello Lovely with Rebecca Luminarias

It's the last Friday of the months which means, sadly, it's our last week with this month's guest designer Rebecca Luminarias. Today's card is clean and simple, but packs a punch. Take a look:

Hi everyone! It's Rebecca Luminarias back one last time with a different approach to a one-layer card. Inspired by the Hand Stitched stamp set, I decided I'd make stitching a main element of my card design. All I needed was the perfect stamp. This cute flower center, or sun burst, from Scandinavian Prints was more than I could have hoped for!

I chose my floss, which is an ochre-hued yellow (DMC 3820). First, I stamped several of the images in a similar ink all over my card. You don't have to match the color exactly since you'll be stitching over it, but try and get as close as you can, just in case parts of the image show through.

With a paper piercing tool (or a needle if you don't have one of those), I carefully poked holes in the center and at the end of each outer point of the bursts. After that, I stamped my sentiment, which was "hello lovely" from Hand Stitched. Since I was stitching, I thought the dashed letters were a fun choice!

After all my holes were made, it was time to get stitching! Embroidery floss is 6-ply, but I pulled it apart and used only 2-ply for this design. The thickness of the lines in the stamps determined that; if they were thicker, I'd have gone with more strands; thinner and I would have only used one, or plain sewing thread. Use your best judgement.

I straight-stitched each line in the image, coming up through the center, and going down through each end point until I was done. Then I moved onto the next one, and soon, I had a whole lovely card full of sun-bursts! And this card is just one layer, but still has texture, thanks to the stitching.

One of my favorite things about using embroidery floss is how saturated the colors are, so the yellow against the plain white cardstock background really stands out.

You can try this technique with all kinds of stamps. I'm still somewhat new to embroidery so I haven't mastered many of the different stitches yet--or small curves in the designs! But I definitely love the way this card turned out so it's one I'll try again and again in different thread colors.

Is this something you've done before? Is it something you might try in the future? Or are you a master-embroiderer? I'm hooked! Thank you so much for having me this month, Neat & Tangled--it has been so much fun!