musings, mutterings, and creative muddle. . .





Thursday, March 25, 2010

Stitches and Stitches ~

Easter and Embroidery. . . seems to be going hand in hand (or hand in machine) for me this year.

Here's a pic of my little embellished cocktail napkins from yesterday's post on display above my kitchen sink window.  Cute!  I just laid them over the top of my current 'valance'.  It's a little much, yes, but fun for the season.  Can you see those tiny glass eggs sitting in the mouth of the cobalt vases?  There's one in the back of the birdy juicer sitting in the measuring cup on the right too.  Can you see them?  They are so tiny.  They have little designs - like polka dots or flowers - painted on them in pastel colors.  So incredibly cute.

New kitty-goal.  Move all those vintage-y eggs from the wood tray on the trunk in the office/studio to Mom's bed before she wakes up.  Goal accomplished.  Sneaky rascals! 


Yesterday I hurried through my work, ignored the vacuuming and laundry to embroider little chickies on some hand towels.  ACK!  But things went terribly awry with my machine.  Oh no! 

I had seen these really cute kitchen towels with chickies across the bottom (Thanks for the inspiration Kat!) and thought:  "I can do that. . . my Ellegante can do that.  YES!  I can!  So over the course of a few days, I dug out some towels I had bought on clearance (with the specific intent of embroidery), located the embroidery designs on a great on-line site, got my threads and stablizer lined out.  And set the machine up.  BAM!.  No.  Not.

3-1/2 hours later and I had completely disassembled my Babylock, re-assembled, did a couple of test patterns.  And repeat. . . and finally deemed it all a SUCCESS! But no time for the official project.  It was time to run a couple errands (with dogs in tow), supper, and piano lessons with J-boy. 

Embroidery was well under way by mid-evening and went fairly late into the night.  What do you think?  I decided I didn't want to put words on my towels - I just liked the line up of the chickies.

The yellow chicks were my first attempt prior to the 'rebuild' of my Babylock.  I touched up the eyes with a black Sharpie (learned that trick when I worked in an embroidery shop many moons ago).  The second attempt (which confirmed my suspicions of troubles) literally ate the towel.  No picture of that.  It was just ugly.  I used it to wipe the tears from my face.  Okay, I wasn't that overwrought (you should be impressed).  But I will save the towel for practice fabric.  For now.



I especially love how the striped chicky came out!  Will do another with the same thread, I'm thinking.  Perhaps with an egg too?  Hmmmm. . . . .  The egg design had misc. colors for the dots - I like how the towel kind of puffs through those spots and there aren't so many colors.  Next I want to do a row of 'Peeps' style bunnies.  What color?  Hmmmm. . . .

I'm a little limited on colors right now.  The machine came with primaries and teal, I found a decent yellow and pink at Wal-Mart, had a few my Granny gave to me several years ago that she had left over from a project, and I had picked up some on a sale rack at a sewing shop in KC.  I just need to buy some seasonal collections.  Pick a brand and buy the collections so there's minimum overlap.  E-bay - here I come!

Oh, Fritzie likes to sit on my lap while I watch the embroidery machine at work.  She sits there all tall and intent.  Will get a pic of it so you can see too.  Hubster just shakes his head.  I do find it interesting that she runs away and hides when I start taking the machine all apart.  Maybe she's scared of the technical language I use??  hahahah!

If April showers bring May flowers then March rains bring April mud.  And we've got it - M.U.D. 




Have a lemonade and mudpie kind of day ~

Robin Z
ksyardbird

1 comment:

  1. Holy cow Robin, those towels are too cute! I'm glad I was able to inspire you (with someone else's handiwork!) to create those wonderful towels!! And I also love your little glass eggs and cocktail napkins over your kitchen sink! Great job!

    Kat :)

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