Tea Towels!

This past week I've been working on these tea towels.

I love embroidery, but I am not very good at hand embroidery.  My oldest daughter, Julie does beautiful work, but she didn't get that talent from me.   So since I got my embroidery/sewing machine, I'm trying the new easier way.  When I saw the Anita Goodesign design pack with these sweet old fashioned looking patterns, I had to do them.  They really look like I spent hours embroidering them, don't you think?!

And I love the rick rack.  I used the jumbo size and I did take the extra time to sew around both sides of the rick rack.  One of my pet peeves is seeing rick rack that has the tops of the curves falling down after washing!

So now that that project is done, what shall I do next?  All I need to do, is go in my sewing room and look at some of my "pigs".    : )

Another old project finished!!!

In 2003 my quilt guild decided to do a fun little project.  It was taking a "plump lady" drawn on a piece of muslin and dress it for different occasions.  There were about a dozen members that participated (we only had a membership of 20 at that time).  We each made 12 of our lady so we could give one to each person.  We did Summertime, 4th of July, Halloween, Occupations, Cowboys and Indians and Christmas.  We also signed our names on each one.  And some of the expressions on them are hilarious!

  
So in the end we had enough to do a small wall hanging for each occasion.  It was a riot to see what some of the members came up with.  They were just fused down so unless we chose to applique them down we couldn't really make them into a washable item. Some had a lot embellishments, so that was a problem too. There were a couple of ladies that really "went to town" and finished all of theirs.  Most of us were not as ambitious.  I made two as you can see.  

After going through my "pigs" I came across them AGAIN.  A good friend of mine and I were discussing them and she said hers were getting worn around the edges because she shows them off quite often.  So we decided maybe we could put them in a book.  It was a challenge because we couldn't make them too thick if we wanted to sew through the spine.  I thought of maybe using grommets, but that would have made the spine too thick also.  In the end, they're not perfect, but the ladies are finally DONE and it just took seven years to do so!!

Small zippered bags

These were my first "in the hoop" embroidery projects.   I was amazed that they were so simple to do and I just kept making them, so my family will be the recipient of some of these.

I tried using some faux leather and it worked pretty well.  I wanted to try some ultra suede but in my tiny little town, the only fabric we have is in a Wal-Mart.  I guess I should be lucky that this one still has a fabric section.  Sometimes you need fabric and notions and just don't have time to drive an hour to get it at quilting stores.          

So many Wal-Marts are losing their fabric, which is kind of sad.  As much as I love the very nice quilting fabrics sometimes you just want inexpensive fabric for some projects.

I also liked using the variegated thread as in the top picture.  Every month I try to buy a few spools of embroidery thread to improve my thread stash.  My husband just doesn't get it.  I told him if I had that new embroidery machine I HAD to have the thread too!  LOL  Actually, he is really good to me, he just likes to give me a hard time!