Halloween Fairy — Trick or Treat

Halloween Fairy — Trick or Treat by Mirabilia / Nora Corbett (chart available from Herrschners) — a witch-fairy in a long Victorian-cut black-and-plum gown with a pointed witch’s hat, holding her trick-or-treat basket, set against a lavender twilight ground. Mirabilia is known for her airy negative-space style — large areas of the design are left as pure backstitch swirls with no fill stitch behind them, so the figure reads as if it’s emerging from sketched mist rather than sitting solidly on the fabric.

Reading the design:

• A crescent moon at upper left, fully beaded in turquoise glass with a soft cream-yellow heart, a stream of bead-trail flowing down from it like falling stardust along the fairy’s loose hair.
• The fairy figure centred — face, hair, hat, gown, and basket all cross-stitched with DMC in the gown’s plum/charcoal palette, with the loose fabric and trim worked in deeper purples.
• A pair of spider webs at upper right and lower right, worked in Kreinik metallic so they catch light against the darker stitching — the classic Mirabilia trick of using metallic where the eye expects something gossamer.
• A small plump jack-o’-lantern and a tiny ghost at her feet on the lower right — the trick-or-treat companions.
• Black backstitched scrollwork and vines spiralling out from the figure on every side, with black pearl beads dotted along the curls and tendrils — the negative space pattern that gives the figure its halo.

This designer has two charts both called Halloween Fairy in her catalogue; this one is the Trick or Treat version with the witch’s-hat-and-pumpkin staging (the other features a different palette and theme).

Stitched on 32ct Picture This Plus Atomic Ranch Lavender Lugana — a soft mottled hand-dyed lavender that does the twilight sky background work as a single continuous wash of colour from upper-left rose-pink to lower-right blue-purple, with the fairy and her swirls reading dark against it. Threads are DMC for all the cross stitch and Kreinik for the metallic spider webs and a few sparkle highlights.

I made my own DMC-only conversion of this chart and published it on the site — see the Halloween Fairy conversion in Conversions for the chart and floss list (free download).

Started June 12, 2024. Finished October 13, 2024.