Don't Compare Your Inside to Someone Else's Outside: Free Embroidery Pattern

UPDATE: my "Don't Compare Your INSIDE to Someone Else's OUTSIDE" embroidery pattern is now available in my Patreon pattern library.

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A couple of years ago I shared a positive little embroidery pattern, a reminder to be KIND to yourself.

Well, this autumn I turned three more positive sayings into embroidery patterns and I'll be sharing them here on my blog over the next few weeks. First up: Don't compare your INSIDE to someone else's OUTSIDE.

It's all too easy to get stuck in a rut of comparing yourself to other people - especially in this age of social media with all those carefully worded posts and carefully edited selfies.

Your insides are complicated, flawed, chaotic, messy just like everyone else's and you'll never know the stress and heartache and hard work going on behind the scenes in someone else's apparently "perfect" life... so go easy on yourself!

This design fits nicely in a five inch embroidery hoop for framing, but I'd recommend using a six inch hoop when stitching it to give yourself more room to work. I actually used a seven inch hoop when stitching this pattern as I'd somehow misplaced my smaller hoops at the time!

I chose pink and turquoise thread as they're so pretty together and look lovely against the pale backing fabric (Cotton & Steel's XOXO in Ghost, which looks grey in some lights and almost brown in others).

Top tip: if you're stitching several matching patterns, don't be an idiot like me and start stitching without checking if you have plenty of your chosen thread. As you can see, I ended up having to use a slightly darker shade for the lettering on this piece... which was not ideal.

The pattern is mostly stitched with backstitch, using three strands of six-strand embroidery thread (floss) and slowly sewing small stitches along all the curves. The small turquoise lines radiating from the circle are each sewn with one stitch.

 

As the fabric is so pale I took care not to carry my threads across the back of the work, giving a neat (ish!) finish. When sewing those final radiating single stitches, I stitched into/under the pink circle of stitching so the thread follows the circle round between the single stitches instead of stretching in straight lines from stitch to stitch (this is a bit tricky to describe but you should be able to see what I mean if you look closely at the back of the pattern I stitched earlier).

You could frame the finished pattern in the hoop as a bit of embroidered art, use it to make something small like a zip purse or add it to a patchwork project.  

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