Sharing the love of stitching

I made this pillow as part of a housewarming gift for some friends of ours and really like the way it turned out. It is a small pillow - about 10 inches by 10 inches and filled with dried rosemary and mint. It smells great!

The back of the pillow is bright and cheery and coordinates with the thread colors - magenta and green - that are on the front of the pillow.

I love giving personalized gifts so it was especially fun to present it to the new homeowners.
The other night my sister and my 11-year old niece, Maddie, were visiting. We were getting ready to watch a movie and since I cannot really watch a movie without a project in my hands, I was stitching. My niece said it looked like fun and said she would like to learn how to do it. You can imagine how thrilled I was to be able to expose her to the joy of stitching. So.... we halted the start of the movie to run up stairs and get a design on fabric for her to work on.

For my last few projects, I have just been tracing the design directly on the fabric (rather than using an iron-on pen) by placing the sheet from my printer on my light table with the fabric on top. The best pencil, I have found, is a Ticonderoga Beginner's pencil. It writes so smoothly on most fabrics. For darker fabrics, I probably will continue to use the iron-on method with a white ink iron on pencil.

Microsoft Word will let you outline almost any font on your computer so it is easy to create designs to embroider. My niece and I opened up MS Word and I asked her what she wanted to embroider. At first she said, "Welcome Home Jessica" because her sister was due home the next day from a band trip. I suggested "Jessica" and told her that it was probably not something she was going to be able to complete before Jessica got home the next night. I told her that it usually takes me daaaaaaaaays (weeks? months? years?) to finish a project.

Well... I was wrong! She sent me a text message: "I KNEW IT! I FINISHED IN TWO DAYS" with a picture. She did such a great job and even put it in a frame.

I later learned that she stayed up until 3:30 am stitching... until my sister made her go to sleep. A girl after my own heart (stitching at 3:30 am)!

She said she enjoyed it and wants to do another project. Yeah! I will not attempt to estimate her completion time on future projects.

Here is a picture of her today received via text message after she got her braces. I love that girl.