Honey Bee Sign Embroidery Design, Machine Embroidery Pattern, Instant Download

A woman in Tennessee sent me a note last week about this honey bee sign she'd hooped onto a linen kitchen towel, said her whole family kept asking where she bought it from. Thats the reaction you want. The design is a wooden cross-shaped signpost where the horizontal arm is shaped like a pointing arrow, with a soft pink heart stitched right onto the post face. Below the arm hangs a cream plank sign with HONEY spelled out in chunky satin lettering that has a real wood-grain texture to it. Sitting at the base is a ridged honey pot, the kind with those stacked ring layers like a little skep, golden yellow all over with honey dripping down in smooth curved lines and a pink heart front and centre. Two yellow sunflowers with dusty mauve centres bloom to the left, theres a lil patch of bright green grass underneath everything, and a bumblebee comes in from the left side, black and yellow stripes with white satin wings. Its farmhouse-illustrated without being kitchy, which is why its been going into so many country kitchen projects lately.

Stitch counts run from 23,098 at the smallest size up to 58,061 at 7.51 inches, so this is a genuinely dense piece. Use a cutaway stabiliser under anything with stretch, jersey and fleece especially. On terry cloth, add a water-soluble topping over the satin sections or they'll sink into the loops and lose their crispness. The wood grain areas use tatami fill with a directional angle on the underlay, so hoop tightly and dont skip that underlay step or the brown areas will show fabric through. The honey pot rings have their own directional stitching that builds the dimensionality, which means your bobbin tension needs to stay consistent across those colour changes. On canvas or denim you can run the 6 inch without the density feeling heavy.

Pop the 4 inch onto a canvas tote and that ridged golden pot lands right at the front panel centre. For aprons, centre the 5 inch on the bib section of a cotton twill or linen apron and it fills the space nicely without overrunning the edges. The bee has alot of colour changes in a small area, so trim your jump stitches on the striped sections carefully or you'll get loops on the backing side. Iron a light cutaway behind satin areas on thin cotton to keep the fills from puckering over washing. Skip the tearaway on denim, cutaway holds better on wovens when theres this much density packed into the centre.

Flag me down if the trims run long on your setup.