I have recently added embroidery to my repertoire of various fiber arts crafts. With this new skill, I have embroidered my name and some cute designs on my Starbucks aprons. I embroidered some foliage for the fall season and recently just finished some string lights on my red holiday apron. My next project will be to embroider some snowflakes! However, I’ve had a lot of difficulty finding a pattern that fits my vision, but this won’t stop me!

Instead of pouring through books and browsing Etsy, I decided to take matters into my own hands and create my own pattern! The first step was to do an image search of snowflakes to get some inspiration for the individual snowflakes. I want a variety of shapes and sizes, and I found some great resources!

This image I found on Vecteezy. It’s a great starting point! The snowflakes have great simple lines I can follow, and I can move the different snowflakes around to place them where I’d like them. Some of them are a little more detailed than I’d like, but I can always alter them!

But my search for inspiration continued! The free images I found online are great, however they will require a lot of manipulating to be able to use them. I’ll have to figure out sizing and replacement. And although these aren’t major issues, it’s a little more effort than I’d like to be putting into this project. As someone who works full time and takes a full load of classes, I don’t have a lot of free time! I’d like to make this process as easy as possible.

That takes me to my next source: AI! This is the first time I’ve ever used AI to produce an image. I did encounter a few difficulties along the way. I tried to be as specific as possible and found that DALL-E 3 did not want to help me when I mentioned Starbucks. And of course, AI can only do so much! Even with all the details I provided, I still wasn’t getting exactly what I wanted. In fact, the more I prompted it to alter the image the wonkier it became.

Then I decided to simplify my request. I asked for an image of simple snowflakes, and was provided with an image that more closely resembles the free images from Vecteezy. But, since I had previously asked for snowflakes that would be easy to embroider, it gave me snowflakes that were embroidered.

With all of these resources I’ve gathered, I think I’m prepared to get started on my project. It will definitely take some finessing, but there’s never a project that works up perfectly!