Now that the summer session has started at preschool, the kids will have water days on Fridays. Along with their swimsuits, I need to send them to school with a towel that has their name on it. So I went to Target today and picked up a few beach towels. This cute pirate octopus towel for JP:
And a simple striped towel for Emerson because the sea green matches her swimsuit:
For JP’s towel, I used Anime Satin Regular from Jolson’s Designs. (I put his full name on there because JP was too short for such a cool font.) I used medium tear-away stabilizer in the hoop and two layers of medium water soluble stabilizer on top (both Sulky brand).
For Emerson’s towel I used Ellie Script from DigiStitches.
It was such a quick project and now they each have personalized towels for their water days.
The other day JP (age 4) was counting my sewing machines and then he said that he wanted to sew something for me. He was so sweet and excited about it, I figured it was time to teach him how to sew. At first I was thinking about buying him a kid sized sewing machine, but he wanted to start right away and I didn’t want to waste money in case he didn’t like it, so we started on my sewing machine.
I don’t really have a plan for how to teach him so we just started with a piece of paper. He was very excited to pick out the thread color. On the first day he sat on my lap and I controlled the pedal. I helped him place his hands and move the paper around without holding it down too hard. Other than that, he basically did what he wanted and sewed all around the paper. I had him practice straight lines a couple of times, but we mostly concentrated on his hands and keeping them out of the way of the needle.
The next night, he again asked if he could sew. He excitedly picked out a new color and this time I let him sit on the chair by himself and control the paper.
Once he got really comfortable with that, I let him control the pedal. One thing about this Bernina that I love is that it doesn’t go very fast so it was perfect for him.
I love his concentration!
Recently I ordered some blanks from Monag to test them out and so far I love them. They are so soft and a lot thicker than what I’m used to, so I think they’ll be great for embroidery. It took me a while to figure out what to put on this tank dress because it’s such a bright color. In the end, I decided to do a simple flower doodle design from Der Stickbaer. I didn’t get a picture of the dress by itself, so I tried to get a few shots of Emerson wearing it this morning before preschool.
And then JP wanted in on the fun.
I think if I had to do it over, I’d make the flowers a little closer together but overall I like how it turned out. It’s simple and colorful and perfect for this beautiful spring weather.
I thought it would be fun to do a craft project with JP since most of my crafting tends to be more for girls. I’ve been loving making the zipper pouches and I thought JP could use one for his toy cars. I knew that he would have a lot of fun personalizing it himself, so I wanted to make him a pouch that looked like a coloring book that he could color in with fabric markers. I couldn’t find any decent black and white fabric that fit my needs, so I used my embroidery machine and came up with this.
Some of the designs are doodle designs and others are regular applique or embroidery designs where I only stitched the outline or the tack-down stitch. On the monsters, I colored in the eyes and the teeth, but deleted everything else. I used medium weight cutaway stabilizer which stopped the fabric markers from bleeding through. The inside is lined with green and white polka dot fabric.
When I first showed it to him, JP hugged it. He was so excited and he started putting toys in it right away.
Then we broke out the fabric markers and started coloring. He mostly used pink and teal because they were by far the best fabric markers.
This is what it looked like when he was all done.
And here’s one happy little boy!
I’m planning on making more in different sizes once I get my new embroidery machine. In the meantime, I need to find some black and white doodle fabric and some decent fabric markers.
Here are the embroidery designs I used.
Front:
Athletic Font by Jakki’s Designs
Stars by Artapli
3D Robot by Urban Threads
Mustache by Digitizing Dolls
Lonely Robot by Urban Threads
Awesome John by Urban Threads
Space Invader by Urban Threads
Back:
Menagerie Monsters by Urban Threads
Snail by Der Stickbaer
Bee by Der Stickbaer
Star by Artapli
Train by Planet Applique
Monster Speaks by Urban Threads
I recently had a request for a shirt to match a Fancy Nancy themed birthday party. Since I can’t do the actual Fancy Nancy, we had to be a little creative. She told me she wanted the number 7 and a crown, her daughter was wearing a zebra print tutu with hot pink and that her daughter loved the color purple. We decided to use her daughter’s name and put Fancy Abby on it and to incorporate the colorful butterflies from the birthday invitation. Once we put all those elements together, this is what we ended up with.
I used Sew What Pro to merge all the designs together and I love how all the colors pop on the black shirt. Here are the embroidery designs I used:
Number 7 with Crown by Lilli Pad Gifts
Mini Butterfly by Embroidery Designs
Caroline Font (for Fancy) by Embroidery Boutique
Sammy Font (for Abby) by Rivermill Embroidery
Pinterest is such a great place to find things that you normally would never find. Even though I have 60 embroidery sites saved in my bookmarks that I use to find designs I love, I never would have stumbled across Der Stickbaer without seeing it on Pinterest. I saw someone had pinned this zipper pouch and instantly fell in love with it.
It’s just so cute and whimsical! However, the entire site was in German, so I didn’t buy the design right away. But every time I saw it on my Pinterest board, I kept thinking about making it. It took some time, but eventually I figured out that there’s a little button on the top of the site that lets you switch it over to English. Oops.
This zipper pouch isn’t made completely in the hoop like the other ones. You make the front and the back in the hoop separately and then sew on the bias tape, the zipper and then sew the front and back together. I’m not good with bias tape and I’m certainly not good with zippers, but here is what I ended up with.
This project is perfect for using up little scraps of fabric. Even though I love the shape of the bag, the curved top and the flat bottom, I’m not that comfortable with bias tape and zippers to want to make this all the time. And I really prefer pouches without visible seams on the inside.
So, I took my favorite in the hoop zipper pouch design from Embroidery Garden and merged the cat design with it. Since they are both made for the 5×7 hoop, the cats fit perfectly with the zipper pouch design. I made sure it all lined up and ended up with this:
Here they are side by side:
I’m going to give the first one as a gift, but the second one is available in my Etsy store.
My next plan is to make this little guy the same way, except I’ll put the front half on the front and the back half on the back so he doesn’t wrap all the way around.
And for more super cute doodle designs, check them out here.
This year for Valentine’s Day, I thought it’d be fun to make some gift boxes for JP to take to his preschool class. I recently bought the adjustable pen holder for my Silhouette from Choma’s Creations. I love this thing because I can use pretty much any pen with it but my favorite so far is the gel pens.
I started off making the tags using this design from the Silhouette store. I added the text (using Current Thin Font from Lettering Delights) and replicated the tags so they took up the entire page. I made sure to set the text to Cut and everything else to No Cut and then used the Silhouette Sketch Pen settings to draw out the text. I used white letter-sized card stock for the tags.
Once that finished, I left the mat loaded in the Silhouette and replaced the pen holder with the blade, set the text to No Cut, the tags to Cut and then cut them out.
For the boxes, I again used white letter-sized card stock and printed some digital paper from Sassy Designs on them. I used this design from the Silhouette store and resized it so it’d fit on the card stock. I was able to print, cut and fold all 16 of them while watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.
Then I just filled all the boxes with some candy and tied the tag to the box with some ribbon.
I wanted to make a special box for his teacher and so I found this great gift card box, again from the Silhouette store. I just took out the Happy Birthday part and added my own text and used the pen instead of cutting the design. I used the same digital paper from Paper Tree House Studio that I had gotten for my blog design. I thought it was such a cute way to hold a gift card and JP was so excited to carry the little box to preschool and give it to Miss Minaya.
I’ve only recently starting using the Silhouette for paper crafts which is kind of funny because that’s one of the main reasons I got it in the first place. I hope to be able to do more and make more with it and start making greeting cards.
I found this great double sided knit fabric at Joann the other day and thought it’d make cute leggings for Emerson.
One yard was enough for two pairs of size 2T leggings. I used my favorite leggings pattern from Jodi Jean. The stripes were hard to cut and sew because it made me dizzy when I looked at it for too long. And I had to take extra care when sewing it to make sure that the stripes lined up, but I couldn’t be happier with how they turned out.
I decided to do a lettuce edge hem because the double needle and I are not friends right now. I think they’ll be cute to wear with just a shirt and also under dresses and skirts.
As for Emerson, she loved the polka dot leggings. The stripes, not so much. After taking pictures of the stripes, she took them off and wanted the polka dot pair back on.
Joann also had the same fabric in pink and a few other colors. I’d like to make Emerson some more leggings if I can stand working with the stripes again.
I have a new addiction.
I found these in the hoop zipper cases at Embroidery Garden and I made one and then made another and then couldn’t stop.
(The flower design is from Urban Threads.)
I’ve never sewn a zipper in my life and so this is amazing to me that the embroidery machine does it perfectly. And it’s completely lined. This is a case turned inside out.
Not only is it lined, there are no raw edges. And the outer fabric is completely attached to the lining at the seam. Meaning, you can’t reach in and pull the lining out. The whole process takes maybe half an hour, it’s that quick. The biggest size I can do is the 5×7 case. The smaller one is made to fit an iPhone, but I discovered it also perfectly fits crayons.
If my machine had a larger hoop size, I could make a case to hold my Kindle or diapers and wipes. As if I needed yet another reason to upgrade my embroidery machine.
I love it when people ask me to make something new for them. It gives me an opportunity to try something new or do something I wouldn’t think of on my own. I was contacted by a mom who wanted a rock star shirt for her daughter. She wanted a variation of this design from DigiStitches.
She asked for the number 6 to be inserted in there and for the stars to be applique instead of outline. I found some stars at Artapli that fit perfectly and I used the number 6 from Cute Applique Alphabet that I got at Embroidery Boutique. I used Sew What Pro and Photoshop to show her how it would look and we settled on this design which is by far my favorite.
I used dot confetti fabric for the guitar and stars and a metallic silver thread for the words.
To help decide on a design, I set it up in Sew What Pro, saved it as a JPG and then changed the colors and the fabric in Photoshop. Here are some of the other variations we had considered.
Then I was asked to make a new pajama set for a little girl and her doll. After some consideration, we settled on some cute penguin fabric that I ordered from Tymber Creek Fabrics. I found the perfect penguin applique design to match from Cherry Stitch Design. I put it all together with a lettuce edge shirt from Kavio and this is what we ended up with.
I used one of my favorite fonts, Jelly Bean from The Itch 2 Stitch for the names. And I thought it turned out so cute, I had to make a pair for Emerson, using a white shirt instead of a pink one.
And finally, a friend asked me to make a girl and doll pajama set for her niece. We picked this great Daisy Peace flannel fabric that I got from Fabric Depot. I got a shirt from Justice in the mall and added the green lettuce edge trim to the bottom and the sleeves using some lime green knit I had laying around. The flower/peace sign came from DigiDolls. I found the perfect font to go with everything, Hippie Garden from Ann the Gran.
Here is a close up of the shirt. I decided to use all capital letters so that each one had the little flower on it. And I think it was a good choice of font to use so that I could use a lot of the colors that are in the pajama bottoms.
