I’m joining the Pinterest Challenge with this Peace quote free embroidery design. Each year the 21st September is the United Nations International Day of Peace so the theme for the Pinterest challenge is Peace.

I’d actually stitched up this embroidered ring of flowers design some time ago but just couldn’t decide what I wanted to put in the middle. I was inspired to stitch a ring of flowers from several embroidery hoops that I had pinned, like this one and this one.

When designing this embroidery I started a quest for great quotes about peace. Quotes online are so confusing! Everything is attributed to several people (usually Einstein, Mandela or Martin Luther King) and it gets really messy and complicated to work out who actually said what!

To be on the safe side, and with the thought that short is sweet, I used a line from the Bible; “Seek peace and pursue it” from 1 Peter 3:11. I can fact check this easily after all!

These are the other quotes I considered for my embroidery. I think they are all great and after as much research as I could possibly do online I THINK these are all attributed correctly but I can’t confirm any of them for absolute definite:

Jane Addams “I believe that peace is not merely an absence of war, but the nurture of human life, and that in time this nurture will do away with war as a natural process.”

Baruch Spinoza “Peace is not the absence of war: it is a virtue; a state of mind; a disposition for benevolence; confidence; and justice.”

Dorothy Thompson “Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict.”

Eleanor Roosevelt “It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.”

Martin Luther King (and I’m pretty sure he did say this one as it’s carved in stone on his memorial and I assume someone did some pretty heavy duty research for that!) “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.”

Enough background quote choosing waffling on, let’s get on with some embroidery!

How to make a Peace Quote Embroidery

To make Peace Quote Embroidery this you will need:

A 6” (15cm) embroidery hoop)
A piece of cotton fabric at least 11“ (28cm) square
The embroidery design
A sharp embroidery needle
A selection of embroidery threads - I used up scraps from my thread collection, it’s a very mix and match design so you can use whatever you like or have. It doesn’t use much, you won’t need more than 1/4 skein of any colour if you used 7 different shades as I have here
An erasable pen to mark the design on the fabric. A water erasable pen is ideal.

Peace Embroidery Design

I used a piece of cotton with a ditsy floral green print for my embroidery. You can use almost anything to be honest, a plain cotton, a soft print. As long as it’s not too thick it should work. You don’t need special embroidery fabric for this.

First you need to transfer to design to the fabric. The easiest method is to tape it to a window, you can find more details on how here - How to transfer an embroidery design onto fabric - tracing the design with your erasable pen.

Fix the fabric centrally in the embroidery hoop and you are ready to stitch.

I used 2 strands of embroidery thread throughout.

You can use whatever colours you like, wherever on the design you like. Use the photos as a guide or just wing it with your own ideas.

How to stitch a floral wreath embroidery with peace quote

You can start with whatever stitches you like too, it doesn’t matter too much, but this is the order I stitched the design in:

I started with the 3 spider web stitch and the 3 woven roses.

I’ve got a tutorial showing how to stitch the spider web stitches here, although for this design I only did 6 “spokes” for my flowers as they are pretty small. I found this great tutorial for the woven roses from The Floss Box.

Next I worked all the back stitch stitches, that’s the stems, the swirls and the writing.

Finally I stitched the lazy daisy flowers and leaves, and finish off with the french knots and straight stitches.

I have a guide to all these basic embroidery stitches if you are new to embroidery.

I also have a tutorial showing how to finish the back of your embroidery hoop neatly using a circle of felt. There are other ways you can tidy the back but this is my favourite.