Mini Bear Portrait Embroidery – Free Pattern!

I first designed this little bear back in 2012.  I had recently started designing embroidery patterns and my first was ‘Boris and his chicken’.

This was the year of the first Fat Quarterly Retreat in London and I was taking part in a ‘sample swap’. In this swap you made 4 of the same handmade items and took them along to the event where you swapped them in a group with another 4 swappers, meaning you came away with 4 different items.

This was my first ever retreat (the whole idea was very new at this time!). I was a little nervous and I so totally over achieved by designing and stitching 4 mini embroideries for my swap partners!

I called these my Mini Woodland Portraits and very soon I had patterns available for these too. I carried on stitching woodland themed embroideries including foxes, badgers and trees.

However with the whole VAT MOSS issue a few years back, and a change to both my website and career emphasis, the embroidery patterns disappeared and I forgot about them.

A few weeks back I was gazing lovingly at my beautiful Passionflower collection of Aurifil 12wt cotton threads and wondering what to do next with them when I remembered my woodland embroideries.  How lovely would they look in the pretty 12wt threads?

Luckily I still had the patterns on file so I began to re-work the mini bear portrait.

Now my embroidery skills have improved enormously in the last 7 years so this time I was able to use some different stitches such as whipped back stitch to emphasise the stems and chain stitch to fill the bear. And of course using the wonderful 12wt thread has made a huge difference to this new version.

My Passionflower collection was launched last year and contains 10 x 12wt cotton spools in the following colours: 2540 – 2120 – 5018 – 2479 – 2835 – 4020 – 3840 – 1148 – 5002 – 3320.

You can read more about it in the auribuzz launch post here.

And readers in the Uk#K can buy the collection direct from my website here.

I love the soft sheen the Aurifil 12wt cotton gives.  Plus it’s fine enough to enable details such as the tiny seed stitches I worked on the bear’s cheeks.  The only other colour I needed to complete this embroidery was the black number 2692 that I used for his face.

I have now updated the pattern using the new threads and stitches and would like to offer it FREE to all the lovely readers of both  Aurifil’s and my blogs!

Just click this link here which will take you to a new web page where you can download the pdf.

The stitches are very simple but if you need a little extra help might I suggest Sarah’s Hand Embroidery Tutorials.  This incredibly comprehensive site has really clear photo instructions for more embroidery stitches than I ever thought possible! You can look up all the stitches I have used including chain stitch, bullion knots and whipped back stitch.

I do hope you’ll stitch your own version of my little bear!

I had an idea while I was stitching this bear… instead of calling him ‘Boris’ again maybe I would leave the space blank and offer the opportunity for someone else to name him? And then that person could also win the embroidery with their chosen name embroidered in the space provided! And what about adding a Passionflower thread collection box too?!

So that’s what is happening over on my Instagram account today too…

Head on over there to enter the giveaway to win the personalised embroidery and a thread box!

Meanwhile I intend to continue updating the old embroideries and making the patterns available to purchase again at some stage soon.