A Little Halloween Something for All

Welcome back Treat or Trickers!

Thank you for all the lovely comments and Halloween links!

I thought it would be nice to have a little something everyone could share, so I have some instructions for a Halloween decoration I stitched up over the weekend.

Dangly Spider Stitch Picture

Being the silly girl I sometimes am, I forgot to take photos during the making! So I settle down with a large cup of fruit tea and scribbled the instructions instead...

The "Bits and Bobs** of Spiders and Stitches"

I stitched this up in the time it took to watch a movie, so quite a quick little thing to do

* a needle *

* 4 inch embroidery hoop *

* Roughly 6 inches of lovely fabric *

* Floss that stands out on said lovely fabric *

* 2 small black felt circle *

* Some black and white floss *

* Black wool *

* Scissors *

* a little bit of ribbon *

* magic pen * 

**

Part 1 or "Jump in the hoop and big fat stitches"

Put your lovely fabric in the hoop nice and tight. Find the centre and from there, draw 7 cobweb 'legs' with your pen. 

With a nice fat piece of contrsting floss, stitch all the 'legs' with a back stitch. I used the whole 6 strands for this bit. You now have 7 big chunky legs (and I mean that in the nicest possible way!)

**

Part 2 or "Spinning a web and cutting it free"

To 'spin' the web, use a thinner piece of floss (I use three strands). Starting near the centre, stitch across from one leg to the next with big, long stitches. A bit of random wonkiness looks best I think, but don't cross the threads! You can see a close up of my web here to see what I'm trying to say. Keep stitching like this until your web is full and you think it will make a nice home for a spider. 

 

The quickest way to neaten the pictures edges is to make sure the fabric is stretched tight over the hoop and the hoop is fastened as tight as possible, then just trim off the extra fabric. For a more secure fastening, leave a little extra fabric and glue this extra to the back of inner hoop. I didn't glue mine this time, but I have zigzag machine stitched the edge to stop fraying.

**

Part 3 or "The little spider friend"

Take the wool and wrap it around your hand twice, making two big loops. Then tie the ends in the middle tightly making four loops as shown. Cut the loops open and you have 8 wooly legs tied together.

Put the knot in the centre of an felt circle and sandwich it with the other circle. Spread the legs as you like around the edge and stitch the black circles together with the black floss. If you like chubby spiders, you can stuff him with a little spare wool before closing up the body. Give the little guy some eyes with the white floss. Smile at what a cute little spider you made :)

Attach your spider friend to his web with a length of thick web-coloured floss.

Tie a ribbon around the hoop's fastening to make it spooky pretty, hang it on the wall and...

Tada! A Dangly spider stitch picture of your own!

I hope you will get a treat from my first little tutorial.

 

And last but not least

 My little spider friend and I can tell you that the super fun random name fruit machine picked...

Patty

as the winner of the Halloween goodies!

I am so excited to be sending Patty my blog giveaway parcel as she has been a brilliant friend to me and is an angel of the crafting world by sharing millions (its a guess but probably not far off!) of crafty links to free patterns and more. She left me the 'treat' of this link to this witchy blog filled with happy pink halloween-ness! 

You can find Patty at her wonderful Pipstitch blog

Thanks again for stopping by!

Happy halfway to Halloween

xo

**These is all my ingredients but please feel free to use your own! Spiders don't have to be black, floss or pipe cleaners make good legs and I have a huge crush on air erasable 'magic pens' but pencils are great too. And I'm sure you clever clogs have many more fun ideas too :)