Back to sewing

Hey Hey,

So as promised this post is going to be about sewing.  Yay.  Hopefully you all are happy about that.  If not I guess I'll just have to start throwing more clay.  

So last weekend was one of my good friend's baby showers, and while I obligingly purchased something off their registry, it just wouldn't feel like a "me" gift if I didn't incorporate something homemade too.   This is what I came up with... all wrapped up...  

It's a hand embroidered blanket.  I wrapped it around a picture of what I purchased off the registry and the ribbon is the selvage of a piece of muslin I had in my scrap stash.  The selvage was a little long, so instead of a normal bow, I made a double and I think It made a pretty good presentation.

I'd never done embroidery before, so I kind of had to figure out as I went, but I think it came out pretty well for an 'on the fly' project.  I basically did a modified chain stitch.  From what I gathered from a really shallow internet search, you generally do embroidery with one single thread.  I did mine with two because it made it go faster. Hopefully this doesn't prove to be a poor decision for one reason or another.  Here it is all laid out:

I didn't have a whole lot of the green plaid flannel, so I supplemented with this flower print stretch cotton.  I think the two fabrics go together really well, but almost immediately after sewing them together, I regretted making the embroidery in off white, instead of true white.  Oh well.  My fiance made the valid point that if the blanket gets put to use it probably won't stay white very long anyways.  So true.

Back view.  The only other thing I regret with this piece is not putting a couple more rows of quilting.  The blanket edge and flannel edge both have double rows of stitching and around the embroidery I put one single row. I'm thinking now though that it probably could have done with one or two more rows in between the embroidery outline and flannel edge rows.  Truth be told, as with everything, this project took longer than expected and I ran out of time. Wah wah.

Anyways, drop by next week to see what I was working on this week.  I'm stoked as always to show you.  :o) Later.