A Simple Embroidery Design

There’s a first time for everything

My wife has received an embroidery book from her grandma, and wanted to give a little gift to her from it. She liked this heart in it - but wanted to make it large enough to be able to write “Mormor” inside of it. ¹

The emroidery recipe. It's a tiny heart made up of flowers and green bits in-between.

She has a lot on her plate, so I wanted to help. So here’s my scaled up adaptation.

I'm working on adding lazy loading to the images on this site - so I thought a little thing like this would be a nice way to test it. Please let me know if you find some image bugs!

The app and process

I used Affinity Designer 2 for this - and I have to say: It worked pretty well! I did it with “true pixel art”, so that one stitch is actually one pixel - but I don’t think that was necessary.

I started by directly copying the heart, but make each “pixel” nine pixels (3x3). Then I added a bit more detail:

The original and the one with more detail. The latter has some small petals between the larger ones, and a dot in the middle in the petal colour.

Now I could move the flowers in smaller increments, so I tried to adjust the shape of the heart, to make it more pleasing:

Four hearts in a row, progressively more 'bubbly'.

Then I added the letters:

The same hearts, but the word 'Mormor' is added to them.

Lastly I added a grid and some numbers, to make it easier to work with:

Grid pattern, and also numbers on all four sides and through the middle - so it's easier to count.

I’ll see if I can post a picture when it’s done!

Literally “mother mother” - which is a Norwegian word for grandmother on that side of the family. ↩︎