The Carousel Embroidery has Begun!

I'm finally making a carousel horse using my embroidery pattern! I did end up making a few minor changes to the pattern, so I will upload the updated pattern shortly. I'm thinking of converting it into a pdf. If you download embroidery patterns, do you prefer jpegs or pdfs? I'd love to hear what you think.

I have these scrumptious towels that I found at Kitchen Kaboodle that I've been waiting to embroider. I'm using Nature's Kitchen Towels by asd living. They're 100% cotton. They have the same thickness as flour sack towels like I made my owl on, but they have a slightly more crinkly surface. I love their texture. The pack I purchased had three towels: white, black, and this gorgeous blue. I've decided since I want to make a white carousel horse the blue will be the perfect color.

I printed out my pattern and traced it with my iron-on pen.

Note that I traced out just the outline of the rectangles on the breast collar and sashing. My iron-pen did not have a fine enough point to do further detail. I will probably end up satin stitching them, so I just needed an outline.

Then I ironed the design onto the towel. I was debating resizing it to be a little smaller, but decided to keep the same dimensions. It's large but these towels are 28"x36" and I'm working on the short side, so I wanted the embroidery to balance out the long length.

Free Carousel Embroidery Pattern

Here's the Carousel Embroidery Pattern. I'm very proud of it, especially since it's my first pattern. Even though it took a lot of time, I think I'm addicted to making embroidery patterns. I would love to have a collection of my own unique embroidery designs. That would be fantastic.

I love how the detailing on the body of the carousel horse turned out. It took me a lot of hours to do, but I think it will really pay off when I stitch up this carousel. I just could not find any carousel embroidery patterns that I liked. This is a time when being an avid horse lover and rider works against me. I wanted something that was cute and fancy, but that also had the conformation of a real horse. Many of the carousel patterns I found were very distorted or over/under stylized. This one suits me perfectly.

The full size pattern is 6 1/2 inches wide by 7 1/4 inches tall. If anyone is interested, I can send you a smaller or larger size.

Feel free to take bits and pieces of the pattern, to mod it out or simplify it. I'd be ecstatic to see different interpretations of the pattern. I do ask that if you use this pattern that you:
1) Give me credit for the design and 2) Don't use it for commercial profit.

To transfer the pattern: Print out a copy of the pattern. Use your favorite transfer method in order to copy it to your fabric. I prefer Sulky Transfer Pens, but a lightbox (or the window - the poor man's lightbox) also works well for lighter fabrics.

Carousel preview

The carousel pattern is done! It took a lot longer than I had anticipated, as I ended up redrawing the entire thing. However, I learned a lot and now I am much more comfortable with the pen tool. I actually had a lot of fun creating it. I'd like to make some more of my own embroidery designs.

Here's a preview of the design. The full design will be coming soon.

Carousel wins!

I've decided I'm going to do the carousel first. I want to do the radish in a smaller hoop, probably around 4". I have a 4" hoop, but I want to have that hoop available for the swap. Until I'm assigned a swap partner I won't know the design I'll use nor the hoop size.

For the fabric, I'm going to try to use cut up the large white flat sheet I got at the thrift store. I bought it because the texture reminded me of flour sack towels. I didn't try the needle test on it, just eyeballed it. Hopefully it will work out. If not, I'm down all of a $1.50. I'm really glad I found that specific thrift store. Their stuff is actually thrift store priced, unlike Goodwill who often charges more for a used item than you can buy it for new. So far I've found a fabulous black polka dot peacoat, the flat white sheet, and I went there on Thursday and found some more great stuff. I'll post that tomorrow, when I can take photos in the sunlight.

So, carousels. I've done quite a bit of Google image searching in the past few days. When searching for a new project, my design background really comes in handy. I find a lot of images, but none of them are the 'perfect' carousel horse. At the least they need a color change. However, most times I want to take bits and pieces from all of them to create my version of a carousel horse.

So far, I like the head on this one the most. I love the bridle, but the reins ending at the crest of the neck really annoy me. If I brought them down to the base of the neck while maintaining that style I think that would be pretty.

I love the saddles, saddle pads and extra stuff on these two. What on earth do they call all that decoration? Even as a rider I don't know. It's pretty, but it's also fake. It looks stenciled on. Clean lines with no dimension. I think I like that. In the photo above it looks like a real horse. That's fabulous, and I think eventually I'll make one like that, but right now I want something stylized. I'm not sure if I want it as clean as it is. I don't know if I want a little more realism.

So now I just need to combine bits and pieces of these, convert them to line drawings, and then make a transfer pattern out of it. Or I might just get lazy and just use one of these drawings instead of combining them.