Cool pencil bag

I was a good little mommy and bought all my daughter's school supplies during FL's tax-free weekend. But at orientation the Friday before school we learned there was one item left off the supply list -- a pencil bag to go in a 3-ring binder. Eh, it could be worse. :)
So the Sunday before school started I actually braved Walmart at 12:30pm. Annaliese and I darted in hand-in-hand to get to the school supply aisle and get out. She had picked green (her new favorite color?!?) for all of her supplies and really wanted a green bag. I warned her ahead of time that it may be slim pickin's at this point and she couldn't be choosy. We saw one bag that had robots on it (uh, no) and headed to another aisle. I saw some white bags and figured that would have to do, and then noticed it said, "Color Me In".

I thought, "oh cool, grab a green sharpie and she can make it match. THEN I looked at it up close...

and exclaimed, "Annaliese! You can pick green fabric, I can monogram it and slip it in!!"
That sealed the deal so we grabbed one and headed for the registers. Here's where the real miracle occurred... the very first express lane had no line and we walked right up to check out. :)

Annaliese picked the fabric, and I created the monogram. I used the new Riddles font from 8 Claws and a Paw. I thought this was a good solution to get a very long name to fill the vertical space.

I slid the piece of fabric in between the two layers of clear vinyl:

 And Voila! A monogrammed pencil pouch with no funky hooping. Cool, huh?

Second Grade!!

Today is Annaliese's first day of Second Grade! Can you believe it?!? Shortly after getting my embroidery machine she headed off to preschool. A couple years later was kindergarten, then first grade... wow! Time flies. Sniff, sniff, I should NOT be looking at all these old posts right now; it's hard to type with misty eyes. Here's my girl, ready for second grade!

Neither Annaliese nor I had a clear vision for what should go on her shirt this year, so we sat down on the couch together with my lap top and browsed designs. We settled on the Pencil Frame from Applique Corner (which I snagged on sale a while back). I swapped out the text that it came with for "Second Grade" using Leon from 8 Claws and a Paw. LOVE this font!

We picked the colors of the pencils to coordinate with the capris we bought for her birthday. We love those capris, but she just doesn't wear her birthday shirt every week, so they needed a new matching top. :)

We had the capris and thankfully I already had a white tee in my stash, so no new expense putting together this outfit! We did however spend money on school supplies... not too horrible though. We decided that Annaliese would deliver her school supplies in a monogrammed shopping bag for her teacher. :)

I used the Taylor font from Lynnie Pinnie. *Hopefully* her teacher won't mind that I didn't capitalize her last name, I just really like this font and it only comes lower case. :)

 And she's off! Annaliese is so ready for school to start. I'm just praying for another great year for my beautiful and intelligent growing girl!

Ready for Kindergarten

Maddy is ready for her first day of kindergarten! Her elementary school's mascot is a bee, and school colors are blue and yellow. This is the first shirt her mom requested:

I used Lynnie Pinnie's Bumble Bee applique design, and added "Maddy is a Busy Bee" with Swirley from 8 Claws and a Paw. Love that font!

The second is a Kindergarten Rocks shirt. I used bee fabric and blue thread so that it's full of school spirit!

The original "Kindergarten ROCKS" design is from Embroidery Boutique. I used the stars and the word Kindergarten, but swapped out the applique word for the zig zag version of EB's Cade Applique Alphabet (with EB's blessing).

 I thought I'd take a moment to give you a little extra insight into my creation process. Often when I'm using a fabric with a motif I want to be sure certain elements are visible withing the applique area. In the case of this bee fabric if I simply laid it down, it's quite possible that no bees would be visible (Like the "K" above). To avoid that I bring the fabric to my computer and lay it over the screen with the design image in the background. I slide it around and rotate it until I find the perfect position for the fabric, then use my water-soluble pen to mark how the fabric should align with the placement stitches. My goal was to get a bee in the wide parts of the R, O and C. I achieved that goal, and it's very close to my preview image!

I used that technique here to get a good color assortment of stars in the 2, here to get a full wand and shoe within the 3, here to be sure the orange dots were not beneath the orange name, here to minimize the number of stems showing, here to get the angle right and put the hot pink stripes in the middle, here to be sure the orange stripe was not under the monogram... etc. You can really use fabric effectively if you take some extra time to place it *just* right. :)

Monogramming for School

I'm hesitant to show these off because as a rule, I don't monogram back packs and lunch boxes. Generally they are virtually impossible to do on my single-needle machine. But for good friends I'll entertain the idea -- if the item is relatively easy to hoop and not too thick. I don't commit to anything until I personally inspect each item. :)
Nicole found this cute set at a Children's Place Outlet store. I figured I could monogram the back pack and pencil pouch, but immediately said no to the lunch box -- it is very well insulated and I didn't think my machine would handle it well -- not worth the risk. Then I realized I could take it along with me to IL and monogram it on my MIL's 6-needle machine!

 Presley wanted her three-letter monogram on the back pack and pencil case, and name on her lunch box. I used Tinker Toy from 8 Claws and a Paw for both.

I thought I'd share a couple pictures of how I hooped the pencil pouch. Inside out on sticky stabilizer:

Here's a close-up. See how close that zipper is to the needle if I'm not holding it back? This is why you have to hold your breath the whole time!

 (If you are wondering about hooping a back pack, you can see my "tutorial" here.)

I also did a couple of lunch totes for Valerie. She grabbed these on clearance last year. I can't remember the name of material they are made out of, but it's a lot like a can koozie. Not too thick to stitch through and very flexible, so I said yes. :)

I used Swirley from 8 Claws and a Paw for their names.

Here's a pic of embroidery in progress. Sticky stabilizer makes it possible, but again, holding my breath! Can't really tell if it's centered and straight until it's done. Eep!

Ok, I think that does it for school bag monogramming this year. Thankfully Annaliese's backpack from kindergarten still looks fantastic even after 2 years of daily use, so we aren't shopping! YAY!

Fabric!!

Yesterday we returned home from a trip to IL to visit family. As part of our journey back we stopped by Hancock's of Paducah. OH. MY. I felt completely overwhelmed when I walked in. I have never seen so much fabric in one place before! This picture was taken at the end of my visit, so I don't look quite so shell-shocked. Behind me is just a portion of the store, less than half!! (You can click each image for a much bigger view.)

 Lovely inspiring quilts hang through this warehouse-type store:

Along the walls are hundreds of quilt patterns. And look at all those beautiful marbles!! The sheer amount of batiks (not pictured) was breathtaking. (SOMEDAY I'm making a queen-sized Storm at Sea quilt with batiks for myself. This will be after Dashiell graduates from college, I'm sure.)

Here's a funny quilt that hangs near the entrance. I thought about getting a picture of my husband next to it, but the reality is he didn't wait in the store for me. He dropped me off and took the kids to Toys R Us instead. :)

So this store isn't a fancy quilt shop, but it's not exactly a warehouse either. It has business hours and other shoppers were there. However, most of the "shoppers" were employees. They went around the store with printouts of web orders to fill carts with fabric, and headed to the cutting tables to get orders ready. When a bolt reaches remnant stage, they take it and toss it on this pile. It was HUGE! (Oh, and notice the husband sitting on the bench reading the newspaper? If you look carefully you'll actually see three gentlemen sitting back there waiting on their wives.)

The batik remnants were $6.98/yard, but the rest were $5.98 a yard. I could have spent an hour digging through all the tables. I did peruse it for quite a while and found some gems. Love getting fabric for $6/yard instead of $11-12/yard! Here's what I brought home, I thought I did a good job containing myself! It was all remnants except for the Christmas Dots, the pink w/dark pink dots, and the basketball print. I love dots, ginghams and stripes!

Won't this fabric look awesome in basketball appliques?!? It was pricey, but I could resist.

There were two things that helped me not go nuts in Hancock's of Paducah. First, their minimum cut is 1/2 yard. If I could have gotten 1/8 or 1/4 yard cuts, I might have gone a little crazy. But my budget just doesn't allow for $5.49 and up for half-yard purchases. The other thing that helped me tremendously was that I had gone fabric shopping in my MIL's sewing room the day before. :) Look what she shared with me! Fun textures, stripes, and more dots!

Look for these in upcoming projects. Now I should be good and prewash everything before adding it to my stash...

Burp Cloths for Cameron

New mom Laura hosted a baby shower for another mom-to-be, and asked me to make a couple burp cloths for a gift. She picked these monograms:

I used the applique C from Embroidery Boutique's Fun Applique Alphabet. I used the Whoa Nelly font from 8 Claws and a Paw for "Cameron".

The other burp cloth uses the baseball monogram from Five Star Fonts.

My first 6x10 design!!!

Yippee! I'm getting a hand-me-down Brother embroidery machine that has a 6x10 stitch field!!
Before moving this machine to my sewing area, I wanted to do some projects with my MIL nearby for some hands on training. OF COURSE my first project needed to use the big hoop. :) I wanted something that would be quick and easy, so I put Applique Momma's Horse (which I recently picked up on sale) on a shirt for Annaliese. This was definitely a joint project -- Kathy supplied the shirts, fabric, thread, stabilizers and machine. It was convenient "shopping" in her studio. I just did the work. :)

I used the largest size of the horse on Annaliese's shirt... just because I could!

Notice that Anna has a matching shirt? Grandma Kathy has a stash of American Girl sized shirts that Annaliese doesn't know about. They should develop a nice matching wardrobe in the months to come. I started with the 4x4 size, shrunk it down and changed the pull compensation a bit. It worked well!

Ok, enough blogging. I need to go work on another project!

Welcome, Baby James!

A dear friend of ours recently had a baby boy, so Valerie and I sent this gift to Jenny:

I loved the little set I made for Brooks a couple months ago, so I decided to do something similar again, this time using my new Riley Blake striped fabric. The applique Circle Monogram Alpha is from Planet Applique:

The Neck Tie Applique from GG Designs. (The monogram was a freebie on Sew Forum several years ago, but is no longer available.)

The bottle applique design is one I tested for 8 Claws and a Paw. I know this is probably a shocker -- I didn't add any custom text to it! :) I liked the simplicity of the design just the way it is.

And finally, a little something that Daddy will be proud to carry:

Though I have done it in the past, I have recently decided not to stitch NCAA and professional sports teams names/slogans. I've read enough accounts of other embroiderers getting "cease and desist" letters -- it is just not worth the risk. I can't afford the big bucks to be licensed for every team out there. So for this burp cloth, I just stuck with our Alma Mater's school colors: Orange and Blue!! However, now that Jenny is living in the south, this might be mistaken for Auburn. Since this was a gift, I used some licensed Illinois ribbon (thanks Kathy!) to be sure the proper sports team was identified. :) The applique football design is from 8CP , and I added the text with Embird Alphabet #8. Go Illini!!

Connect Women

My friend Leslie is a member of a women's group at her church called "Connect Women." She sent me their logo and asked if I could embroider it on some aprons they had purchased for an upcoming meeting.

Here's the logo image:

Amazingly enough I already had the font Scriptina digitized (it's from "SewCrazie" and I got it either on SewForum or her yahoo group a long time ago, but can't find links to it now.) It resized really well since I needed it significantly bigger. And I added "women" with Embird alphabet #2. The only thing I had to digitize were the little petals around the "o". I was excited to figure out how to import an image into Embird Editor and position each individual letter exactly where it needed to go. I don't think I've ever used that feature before! I took all of my pink and purple threads and let Leslie choose what I should use since I couldn't decide. :)

I'm pretty impressed with the results! I'll be honest, I'm not a fan of this brand of apron (or tote bags for that matter). I can't remember the brand name off the top of my head, but I know it's sold at Michaels and Walmart. The canvas is very textured and it makes the embroidery look jagged, even using solvy on top. My test stitch on felt looked WAY better. Now that we have a Hobby Lobby (♫ Hallelujah! ♫) I will recommend their aprons, which appear to be more fabric-like (maybe a bottom-weight?) than canvas. Any other suggestions for local purchase aprons?