Doodle The Mascot

I joined the local embroidery guild a couple weeks ago, and for their first project of the year they are doing redwork embroidery. Basically you take a stylized image, transfer it to your fabric, and use outline stitch (also called stem stitch) to stitch the outline onto the fabric. It’s redwork because you traditionally use red thread for this. Bluework uses blue. It would be greenwork if using green. You get the idea.

Anyway, the second thing we are going to be doing is turning a redwork piece into a round ornament. Since the first thing I stitched is around 5 inches and we need something around 3 inches for the ornament, I’ve been trying to come up with something good I can use for the second lesson.

Today while going through some of my papers upstairs, I found the Doodle The Mascot page from the One Piece manga that suggests ways to turn a skull and crossbones into a customized pirate flag. Since I’ve also been trying to learn Illustrator and playing around with my graphics tablet, I’m going to create a pirate flag for Santa and use this as my ornament. Brilliant!

Basically, it will be a skull wearing a Santa hat with candy canes where the crossed bones would be. The bonus is that it will be stitched in red, so it’ll look very appropriately Santa-like.

ETA: Here it is! I suck so it took way longer than it should have, and the hat is a little weird. But I still think it’s awesome. Click for the full thing.