There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles in when I sit down with a skein of embroidery floss and let a season take shape between my fingers. This collection started the way most of my favorite projects do — with a color. A deep rust orange, the kind you only really see for about six weeks a year, right before the trees go bare. I knew I wanted to build a whole handful of tiny things around it.
What came out the other side was this: a little acorn, its cap worked in a rich chestnut brown over a rounded cream body. A pair of Indian corn cobs, mottled and knobby, tied together with a bow of trailing husk-colored strands. A sunflower with layered petals in gold and blush, its center a dense, dark button of stitches. And a trio of maple leaves, each one a different color story — burnt orange, honeyed yellow, moss and olive — so that no two ever quite match.
Every piece is made entirely from cotton embroidery floss, which is not the easiest material to work with at this scale. It splits if you look at it wrong. It takes patience to keep the tension even when you’re working stitches this small, and even more patience to get a leaf’s veining or a sunflower’s petals to actually read as what they’re supposed to be rather than just a vaguely round blob of yarn. Each charm probably represents a few hours of work by the time it’s stitched, stuffed, shaped, and finished with its clasp — and that’s before I even get to arranging them for photos.
I won’t pretend it’s fast. It isn’t. But there’s something almost meditative about the repetition — the same handful of stitches, worked over and over, slowly becoming a leaf, then an acorn, then a sunflower. I like watching a shapeless loop of floss turn into something with a personality. I like that no two leaves ever curl exactly the same way, so every charm in this collection is quietly, permanently one of a kind.
My hope is a simple one: that these little charms end up somewhere they get used. Clipped to a bag on the way to a coffee shop, hanging from a set of keys, tucked into someone’s pocket on the first genuinely cold morning of the year. I made them slowly and with a lot of care, and I hope that whoever ends up carrying one around gets even a fraction of the enjoyment out of it that I got from making it.
Autumn doesn’t last long. I like that these do.