Happy Haunting
A three-line Halloween rhyme sampler — black cats prowling, pumpkins gleaming, luck on Halloween — with a haunted-house moonscape across the top and pumpkins-and-witch-hat row at the bottom. Stitched on 28ct Wichelt Plum Blossom for a softer pink-peach background than the original dirty-aida design called for.
- Designer
- Maria Diaz
- Fabric
- 28ct Wichelt Imports Plum Blossom (#76-25L)
- Stitch count
- 116w x 178h
- Floss
- DMC
- Finished
- October 2023
Happy Haunting by Maria Diaz — originally published as the cover-feature project in CrossStitcher Magazine, October 2019 (issue with materials available from Willow Fabrics).
The design is built as a three-row rhyme sampler:
When black cats prowl
And pumpkins gleam
May luck be yours on Halloween
with a haunted-house-and-bat moonscape arching across the top, candy-apple and skull-and-poison-bottle row in the middle, an owl and bat flanking the Halloween word, and a row of jack-o’-lanterns and a witch hat anchoring the bottom. There’s a tiny pumpkin charm and a spider charm sewn into the piece — the magazine even includes a tip about adding backstitch “drag lines” above the spider so it looks like it’s just descended from a tree.
The original chart calls for 14ct Zweigart Dirty Aida — a rustic tan-brown ground that gives the design a harvest-field look. I went the other direction: 28ct Wichelt Imports Plum Blossom (#76-25L), a hand-dyed linen with a soft pink-peach mottled wash, which halves the finished size and pulls the whole piece toward a softer, more vintage-feminine palette than the magazine model.
Threads are DMC throughout — regular stranded cotton plus the chart’s specified DMC Light Effects metallics (E310 black sparkle for the words, E940 silver for the moonglow and bat eyes) and DMC Étoile sparkle cottons (C310 and C725) for the highlights. The Étoile is what makes the moon and the Halloween word actually shimmer rather than read as flat colour.
Framed in an ornate dark frame with sculpted corner motifs (bats and pumpkin shapes worked into the moulding, picked out in soft gold) — the frame was the first thing I picked, and the rest of the colour decisions followed from it.
Finished October 8, 2023.