Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Craft Night #3 - Embroidery

Another successful craft night was had by all...last night we learned to embroider. We used iron-on patterns on various items and did some hand-stitching! This is a great, fun, quick project to make lovely gifts for people. Some of us embroidered on tea towels and table cloths. Moriah stitched on a cute tote bag and Katie is making a perpetual calendar by sewing the month names on various types of fabric.

We used patterns from Sublime Stitching, a really cool, updated collection of iron-on patterns. You just transfer these to your fabric and stitch away! Here's another fun resource for vintage patterns on Flickr, Hoop Love. Jill also supplied us with a great book, Doodle Stitching, detailing the various embroidery stitches. Most of us used back stitch and slip stitch to create nice solid outlines on our designs.
Kristen and Charisse joined us for the first time and we were happy to have them! I think they had a fun time and will be coming back. Thanks to Jenny, Moriah, and Katie for some yummy treats to munch on while we worked.We thought of many different projects you could embroider on for gifts: a pincushion, a pillowcase, tote bags, knitting project bags, and you can also embroider on a piece of fabric and use your cute wooden hoop to frame it in (just trim the excess fabric away and glue the hoop down to your fabric!)

Here are the supplies you'll need if you want to stitch along too:
-embroidery needle
-a few colors of DMC floss (the kind you used to make friendship bracelets with!)
-a hoop (match the size of this to the size of the pattern you want to do and/or the size of what you're stitching on)
-an iron-on pattern or a printed pattern and some transfer paper
-a fabric pen that is water soluble (if you want to draw your own designs!)

It's a nice in-expensive hobby and so much fun!
We sure missed Jill this time and hope she gets better soon! It wasn't the same without you Jill!

Our next Craft Night will be December 1st. We'll be making something to put us into the holiday spirit and will be doing a crafty gift-exchange, so stay tuned!

Happy Crafting,
Laura

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