Scary Berry

Scary Berry by Erica Michaels, from her Linen Berry Collection — the chart sheet carries both a large and a small berry, 126w × 73h all together, with the large one finishing around 4 inches. I’m stitching the pair.

The “berry” is the point: rather than a rectangle, the design is charted as a fan-shaped panel with a black outline running around it, and that outline is the cutting-and-seaming line. Folded and stuffed, the fan becomes a strawberry-shaped hanging ornament / emery. Flat on the frame it looks like a wide triangle of scenery — which is exactly what makes it fun to stitch.

Inside the outline is a complete Halloween night scene:

• A tall haunted house dead centre, windows lit magenta, a red front door, and a full moon rising behind it.
• A witch on a broomstick silhouetted across the moonlight with her black cat riding along behind her.
• Four white ghosts drifting at different heights, plus a smaller one peeking out of a doorway.
• Bare black trees, a graveyard of pale headstones and crosses off to the right, a scarecrow, a black cat prowling the path, and a row of fat orange jack-o’-lanterns along the bottom of the golden hill.
• Gold stars scattered across the sky and a curl of white smoke rising from the chimney.

Erica Michaels’ model is on 36ct Storm; I went finer and darker, onto 40ct Picture This Plus Gothic Newcastle — a deep mottled blue-violet that does the whole night sky with no stitching at all, so the ghosts and the moon glow straight off the fabric. Threads are Gentle Arts Sampler Threads and Weeks Dye Works over-dyeds with DMC filling in.

The large berry was started July 16, 2026 and finished September 8, 2026.

The small berry

The day after the large one came off the frame I cast on the small companion berry from the same chart — this one on 40ct silk gauze rather than linen, in DMC and Gentle Arts. It’s still in progress: follow it on the WIP page.

Both berries are earmarked for the same finishing session — they’ll be made up into actual berries at a retreat in October 2026, which is why the large one is still sitting flat in the photo above.