Beer ghost in the graveyard

*humon's Beer ghost is in a graveyard looking for beer after the boys had had a spooky Halloween party in the graveyard. He's looking at the fallen beer bottle hoping to find a beer in it.

I made this for #stitchingpirates's 8 Colour challenge I had to use at least 5 of the following colours:

Black
Orange
Purple
Green
Silver
Red
Ecru
Glow-in-the-Dark

I made it a personal challenge to not just use 5 of them but ALL of the colours listed + some more to complete the picture. I used a previous pattern of mine for the beer ghost and then found some free clipart on the web to make the gravestone, tree and moon patterns. I'm using several greens and oranges. The red comes in the shape of 349, the purple is trying to hide in the embroidery and pretend to be brown but it's a really antique mauve ultra dark 3802 and the black is of course 310 and the same goes for the silver (E168), glow in the dark and ecru. I used 45 colours - 31 of which are in the tree.

Full colour list:
310 - black
318 - Light steel grey
349 - Dark coral
356 - Medium terra cotta
402 - Very light mahogany
413 - Dark pewter grey
445 - Light lemon
472 - Ultra light avocado green
700 - Bright christmas green
720 - Dark orange spice
721 - Medium orange spice
727 - Very light topaz
734 - Light olive green
745 - Light pale yellow
801 - Dark coffee brown.
801 - Dark coffee brown.
890 - Ultra dark pistachio green
900 - Dark burnt orange
919 - red copper
920 - Medium copper
921 - copper
922 - Light copper
946 - Medium burnt orange
947 - Burnt orange
970 - Light pumpkin
3340 - Medium apricot
3772 - Very dark desert sand
3776 - Light mahogany
3777 - Very dark terra cotta
3778 - Light terra cotta
3790 - Ultra dark beige gray
3802 - Very dark antique mauve
3826 - golden brown
3827 - Pale golden brown
3830 - terra cotta
3853 - Dark autumn gold
3857 - Dark rosewood
3858 - Medium rosewood
3859 - Light rosewood
3860 - cocoa
3861 - Light cocoa
3862 - Dark mocha beige
E168 - Silver
E940 - Glow in the dark
Ecru - ecru

As I didn't have enough black Aida (which is what I *really wanted*) and I was a bit short of funds at the time I decided to try my hand at making my own dyes from stuff I had lying around the house already and I made "black" dye from liquorice and brown dye from coffee. The black only made the fabric go a light greyish colour but it looks nice enough in my opinion.

It got a bit fiddly with some of the colours when embroidering the tree and I discovered a few stitches I'd missed before as somehow when there are lots of colours with only a few stitches I seem to overlook one or two. The red doesn't show as much as I'd expected but it's hiding in there in most of the leaves.

I wanted to add an embroidered border to the embroidery but it just didn't look "right". I tried several embroidered ones, a heavy chain stitch, cross stitch and something else I can't remember the name of and ended up ripping them all out because it looked "wrong". Another thing I tried and ripped out was mist going behind the ghost and in front of the tree - the idea was good but I couldn't work out how to stitch it and the feather stitch using white pearlescant thread I thought might work looked awful. In the end I decided that I'd let the dyed embroidery fabric speak for itself and left it as it was.

I blogged the whole process of making the embroidery on my blog which you can find here: 8 Colour challenge where there are also photo's of all the colours used.

Size: 4 3/8 x 5 1/2 inches / 11,25 x 14 cm
The tree is 4 1/4 x 3 1/8 inches / 11 x 8 cm
Stitched on 18 count Aida / 7 squares per cm Aida
Total stitches (excluding the silver stars) 2815

My best attempt at photographing the glow in the dark beer ghost - best seen in full res as the thumbnail will show as black.

I got my boyfriend who has a better camera to make a new photo and this is what it really looks like in the dark:


Edited to add:

Oh WOW!! I won 's 8 Colour challenge!! Thanks so much