Hello Autumn Bath Mat

Autumn is officially here! It’s little sad to see summer go, but trees look beautiful with all the colors change! Several people from Canada that I follow on Instagram said that it skipped autumn and went straight to winter. I would hate that kind of weather if that happened in Chicago! I don’t really like winter because of the cold weather. I don’t know Canada weather, but hopefully they’ll get “no-snow” weather days!

In Japanese, there are phrases that express autumn. Some of the phrases are: “autumn of reading”, “autumn of appetite” and “autumn of sports”. Basically it’s a concept that autumn is best season to do those actions and such. Like for “autumn of appetite”, there are so many delicious foods in Japan during the season. Among those phrases “autumn of [something]”, my favorite is “autumn of crimson leaves” I do love food, I’m not gonna lie, but if I was going to define autumn, I say leaves changing colors. They’re just so beautiful!

Because I wanted to express autumn with leaves, I decided to use surface stitch for petiole (I thought it was called stem, but I was wrong! I didn’t know stem was the core part and not for the individual leaf!) Stitching diagonal was not so easy for me, but each leaf looks great! I was afraid how it would turn out at the end, but I’m glad they all look like leaves! Red and orange leaves are random shapes I chose as leaves, but not for the yellow one! Can you guess what it is? If you guessed ginkgo leaves, you’re correct! I was so happy when my mom saw this and guessed it correct right away!

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When you get to squares for leaves, you need to leave long yarn tail (beginning or end of color change…depends on how you want to make your final touch) in order to surface stitch! You are going to weave in one or few squares in order to get to where it needs to be. It will be a white square, either bottom right or bottom left of 3×3 squares that make up a leaf. Surface stitch diagonally for 1 square, and weave in ends. I think you can get a hang of it once you’re in a roll!

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For this bath mat, I used 6 colors. Just like my Hello Summer Bath Mat, I decided to make borders with 4 colors. I was debating whether I should go with yellow or orange, but I’m really liking the orange border together with red! I think it really brings out that autumn feeling more!

I’m still having little difficult time when switching colors. You can kind of see gray when switch to white. It’s little hard to hide it especially when high contrasting colors are next to one other. I learned few tricks after making many C2C projects, and one of them is when changing color, you can use yarn ends to somewhat cover up the color you don’t want to see! (Sarah from Repeat Crafter Me has a video for this)