Rosie & Bear First Stitches Sampler Pattern

It’s funny how sometimes inspiration can come from nowhere, when suddenly you have an idea your fingers are itching to stitch. I’ve been stitching a lot of Rosie & Bear lately for my Diamond Jubilee quilt project (the one that’s going out as a free partwork for magazine subscribers).  Below is a detail from the Canada block…. 

Doesn’t Bear make a wonderful Mountie!!  He’s waving so hard that I think his hat’s about to fall off – but he doesn’t care one little bit!  Anyway, I haven’t done any non-quilt blocks for Rosie & Bear for a long time and so I was sort of vaguely considering what I might do when suddenly .. inspiration came to me.  I was very lucky to learn to sew from a very early age, and as a child Rosie loved sewing too – I still have some of her earliest projects tucked away safely in one of my drawers. (just like mothers everywhere!) So I thought ……

What about a sampler, the traditional first project for young stitchers in days gone by?   I was smitten.  Couldn’t wait.  Dropped everything else and sketched it all out in a single session.  I’ve used a nice cursive font  for the alphabet and included some tiny woodland animals and birds – I think you can just make out a rabbit and mouse in this picture. 

Rosie is concentrating very hard on her stitching – she’s going to have a little silver needle in her hand and Bear is down at the bottom right of the sampler.  There will be a border of flowers too, and a space for personalisation.  I don’t usually like to post my work so early in a project, but I am very pleased with how this is taking shape.  Sometimes a design takes ages and has to be unpicked and re-worked several times, but this one’s coming together really easily.  It’s hard to put it down – but Ben can be relied upon to remind me when it’s time for his walk!