I am not going to lie, I felt as though last week I was starting to, dare I say it, get bored with my embroidery journey BUT – This was my favourite week yet!! Put some of the skills I have learned so far to the test with doing more project-based practice. Let me tell you, this made a world of difference in my motivation to keep on learning!

This week I had seen my two year-old nephew and he reminded me of his love for dinosaurs and in particular that “Auntie is scared of dinosaurs”. A little backstory on that, I was Facetiming my nephew and my mom, he wanted to show me his new dino that made noises, I made a BIG deal about it scaring me and he has NEVER let it go! Anyways, this had me thinking – if I was going to make an embroidery for my niece… my nephew needs one too, right? The answer is YES.

So I got started by google searching “dinosaur hand embroidery pattern free” (I feel like I have gotten in the habit of searching for ‘FREE’ things since being a student!). I did a scroll through my google search and ended up picking the first result, not because it was first, but because it didn’t look too complex and it wasn’t just the outline of a dinosaur.

Gathered, a crafting website had the pattern of the dinosaur I decided on – Free quick dinosaur embroidery. I found that this website articulated the steps of this pattern almost similarly to how a recipe would be:

• Outlined the stitches I would need to know
• What materials will be needed
• Free template
• Step-by-step guide to the actual embroidery

So far this has been one of my favourite learning resources – it was simple and everything was laid out for me to follow. I am not sure if this would have worked as well when I was learning the stitches, but it worked pretty darn good for following a pattern!

The ‘recipe’ had 3 dinosaurs, but I decided to do only one and to make it bigger… this ended up biting me when I ran out of embroidery floss, not once… but TWICE. I ran out when doing the bottom part of the brontosaurus so had to switch colours for the legs… which I then ran out of that colour as well. I will be finishing it after a quick trip to Michael’s but here is a picture of my work in progress!

I still haven’t aced the transfer of template onto the fabric, so I know what I will be working on next week!