Skeletal Needle Lace Leaf

I really need to start keeping track of where I find these links!  Regardless, not too long ago, I somehow stumbled across this needle lace skeletal leaf tutorial.  I had wanted to dabble in needle lace again and this was a perfect opportunity to to so!

The nice thing about the tutorial is that provides a pattern sheet with various sized leaves.  They are all similar in shape though, so no fancy maple leaves!  This is the largest size and measures just under 3 inches from base to tip.

I followed the tutorial pretty closely so some things were worked differently than if I had set out to make a needle lace leaf on my own (if that makes sense...).  All in all it was a very fun and quick project - if I recall correctly, I completed it over two evenings.

One thing I will say though, is that this was very hard for me!  It is essentially free-form, which is not something I do well with.  I like to make things very precisely (event hough it's often not obvious based on my finished products!).  In order to make this look more like a skeletal leaf, the stitches are deliberately made fairly loosely in an almost random manner.  That pretty much went against my way of making things, but it was a good small piece to try it out on.

The only thing I would do differently if I made this again would be the direction of filling the leaf.  I tried to go diagonal in each area between the veins as stated in the tutorial, but that did not seem to work well for me.  In the second half of the leaf I switched to working from the central vein out to the side, which was easier for me.

Part of what attracted me to this pattern (other than the colors!) is that I had thought about doing something kind of similar over the summer.  I had not planned on making such an open skeletal leaf though.  Maybe next summer I will try out my idea.  The leaves I had planned on making are now dead so I can't get a photo of them anymore...

I can see myself making a few more of these - at least one in each of the colors of floss I bought!

Made with DMC embroidery floss color 740.