#rather than going into my giant stack of finished pieces I'll never frame this baby gets to go to a therapist friend's office so that's nic

[hardcorestitchcorps]

A few years ago, a professor acquaintance asked me to design this pattern for her to stitch and put in her office so I thought I'd finally make it myself. The pattern is free here and there's also a blank version if you wanted to use different flags or flags representing a different issue entirely.

I had mixed feelings stitching this right now, since where is a truly safe space other than the tiny one we might be able to curate for ourselves, if we're lucky. But we can never underestimate how someone seeing their flag, especially a less used one, in an office or public setting, can be a huge comfort. There's also this apt quote from Welcome to Night Vale:

“Are we living a life that is safe from harm? Of course not. We never are. But that’s not the right question. The question is are we living a life that is worth the harm?���

I'm not sure how accessible Flickr is for folks anymore, so I'm also putting the pattern under the cut here and some notes about colors.

These are all DMC colors. Keep in mind that dye lots shift over time and please go by what you hold in your hand (maybe you've got a really old or really new skein of one of these) vs what I've said or what you see in the finished image picture (550 as the main darker purple shows up very purple in person but on my laptop monitor it is SO dark, so don't discount a choice based on your screen). Stitching again I might use 312 for the blue in the bisexual flag instead of 517, though realistically it likely makes little difference.

And yes, not every flag can be put here. There are only so many letters and I really wanted the umbrella rainbow flag to be dominant. I tested how it would look with the progress pride flag, but it didn't look great on the letters and would be redundant. You could always use the blank pattern file to change that and free up another letter for a flag I couldn't include.

If you're altering the pattern keep in mind some flags won't work well with certain letters. For example, the demisexual or demiromantic flags should be stitched on an E or F.