Sleepy Hollow

Sleepy Hollow by Tiny Modernist — a four-panel Halloween sampler, each strip telling a piece of the night through a rhyming couplet:

On all hallows’ eve beware of black cats and blood-thirsty bats

Spooks all gather for a jamboree, dancing with a fiendish glee

You’d best beware the witching hour when every witch will show her power

The headless horseman, he’s the worst — stay away or be forever cursed

Each panel has its own little night-scene: a haunted house with a vampire kid out front, a graveyard jamboree of dancing skeletons, a witches’ coven around a cauldron, and finally the headless horseman riding past a covered bridge with his pumpkin held high.

Stitched on 28ct Mirage Lugana — a hand-dyed Lugana with a soft mottled grey-and-purple wash that reads as twilight without me having to stitch any sky at all. Stitched 1-over-1 instead of the more typical 2-over-1 you’d use on 28ct, which makes the figures finer and lets more of the Mirage’s hand-dyed background show through between stitches. It’s a slower stitch this way — closer to petit point — but the trade-off is the whole piece feels lighter and more atmospheric than a fully covered version would.

Threads are DMC for the bulk of the design plus The Gentle Art overdyed cottons subbed in where the slow colour shifts in the overdyes added some life to the otherwise-flat blacks and greens — the trees and grass especially benefit from that.

Framed in a textured antique-blue ornate frame with a double mat (deep blue + grey) so the whole presentation reads like a vintage book illustration.

Finished April 29, 2023.