the cottage, stitched

For months now, I've been tossing making throw pillows for the living room to the bottom of the priority project list.  Somehow, this little pillow made it the top of the list this fall, and I'm so happy with how it looks.

I started with a picture of our house in big huge labs color palette generator.

I matched the palette colors with cosmo floss colors over at the workroom.

For the pattern, I took two pictures of the cottage.

I love the oak tree in front yard, but I really didn't want a big dark tree trunk in the middle of my pillow so I pulled both shots into photoshop elements and overlapped them to get both sides of the front door in one shot.  In elements, I clicked on image, then to mode and chose grayscale.  Once the picture was converted to grayscale, I chose filter, then stylize, then find edges.  This left me with a line drawing style picture I was able to print onto a sheet of transfer-eze that could be stuck onto my background fabric.

When I was done stitching, it looked like this.

At this point, it's hard to see past the transfer-eze.  Once it was rinsed and pressed I could not wait to get it on the pillow form.

Here it is on the front step

I'm off to make some new kitchen curtains now.