An Ornament for Heart Month

I'm not sure, but I think February is National Heart Month - awareness of heart disease, which is the #1 killer of women in this country.

This is my own special cause too, as if I had been aware of the symptoms years ago, I would not have become so ill with it myself. I don't think people realize that heart disease involves more than just cholesterol, blood pressure, etc., but symptoms we don't recognize because we haven't been made aware of them. My blood pressure is normal, as is my cholesterol - and I weigh what I did in college. No health problems at all until this heart valve thing laid me low shortly after my 65th birthday - but I am stubborn, and have things to do and places to go and needlepoint to stitch, so here I am still when my doctor told me three years ago to finish all my projects quickly and put my affairs in order ( or at least my stash of threads and my books)

Anyway, I haven't had time to totally finish this ornament to see what it will look like in its entirety, but this is enough to give you the idea. I have made the chart to include the framework only, as the circle may then be simply filled out with bargello - I used the YLI Ribbon Floss for that, and the center is done in basketweave with DMC perle cotton #5. I left the little warp dips and inserted the Sundance #250 hexagonal beads for a bit of "sugar sparkle."

This pattern would also fit the egg we used here in previous posts. The circle is the same one also as previous posts - the 4 1/4" diameter one. I do like the flowers much much better than the square ones on the first trial of this design!! They are made with smyrna cross "bumps" - or you could simply do them in mosaic stitch. Feel free to play around with your own color choices!!


To draw the flowers onto the canvas, I used my colored Sharpie ultra fine point markers so as not to confuse myself with the diagonal lines, etc.

See the posts below on this ornament for thread choices, etc.