Midnight Seance

Midnight Seance by Pickle Barrel Designs (Nancy Greenberg) — published in Just CrossStitch Magazine, Halloween 2019, page 78 — the annual Halloween special collector’s issue that runs to sixty-odd designs across framed pieces, bookmarks, pincushions, gift tags and ornaments. Spooky Boo’s Halloween Drum came out of the same issue two pages later, on page 80 — I stitched that one in 2025 and this one in 2026, so the magazine has now given me two finishes six years after it landed.

The scene is a small graveyard at midnight, stacked between the two words of the title:

• Midnight arched across the top and Séance across the bottom, both in a spidery blackletter with heavily ornamented capitals — the M and the S each carrying extra curls and flourishes.
• A field of headstones in soft greys and silvers, set at staggered heights so the back row reads as further away.
• A ghost rising dead centre — white, black-eyed, open-mouthed, with a bright gold crest above it.
• A bare tree on the right, worked in a shaggy brown that gives the branches real texture against the flat stitching everywhere else, with a single orange pumpkin tucked at its roots.
• A black wrought-iron fence running the full width below the stones, pointed finials along the top, with a few small orange blooms caught in the railings.

The fabric is the whole trick here: a Bestitchme opalescent linen in a blue-and-purple mystery colourway — mottled periwinkle drifting into violet, shot through with an iridescent thread that catches the light. It does the moonlit-sky work on its own, so the design never has to stitch a background, and the sparkle sits exactly where a midnight séance wants it. Threads are DMC throughout.

Started June 16, 2026 as part of a prep wave ahead of that summer’s Frogwarts retreat, picked at across July, then set down until October — when two sessions on the 12th and 13th took it from “only 224 stitches left!” to done. Finished October 13, 2026, seven sessions and about 1,240 stitches in total.

Not mounted yet.