Category Archives: Machine Embroidery

I’ve been working on a foundation pieced snails trail block embroidery design. At the moment I’m testing the design – more on that later.

However, I took a break from this to make some birthday cards for my daughter’s friends.

They’re quick to make and I think quite effective. I’m not sure about their ‘keep-ability’ because I use double sided sticky tape – probably rots the fabric away.

They’re very easy to do, but you do need a fancy sewing machine. I purchase the card blanks from Officeworks, use the built-in alphabets on my sewing machine and then sticky tape the fabric to the card. I use a stabiliser on the back of the fabric to make the inside of the card look OK.

I’ve stitched the January block for my Mum’s wall hanging…

Here is an image of it – I haven’t cut the jump threads and probably won’t bother because it’s just to give my mother an idea of the style and size.

We were hoping to fit three months into one hoop, but it was all a bit squishy and a bit unreadable. The best I could do was two months in one hoop. Although I think it would be better to do each month separately and then join them and maybe use bias strips to hide the join.

My mum is planning on making a calendar using machine embroidery. I thought I would help her with the design.

I’ve been using my Janome Scansoft software (very old – I bought it for $5 in the bargain bin) to design the letters and numbers and Embird to merge the designs and place them in the appropriate place. Somewhat time consuming but pretty easy.

My mum wants the public holidays in one colour and  school holidays in another. That should be easy to do once I find out the 2008 term dates. 

As you can see from the image, I’ve been working on January. I’ll get my mum to approve the design before I continue with the other months. My current thinking (which could change at any moment), is to make a quilted wall hanging with the months as blocks.

I love the design aspect of all projects, but as you all know I’m not so good at finishing things off!

One of my goals is to become an embroidery designer so this is all grist to the mill so to speak.

I took time of from my somewhat depressing quilting endeavours to make a birthday card for one of my daughter’s friends.

I designed the Olivia text using my very old (and clunky) Scan and Sew software (from Janome).

I bought the card at Officeworks – they seem to have quite a range of invitation/card stuff.

I spent the brief bit of free time I had today designing T-Shirts for my market stall. I make personalised childrens and babies clothes – that is I put names or initials on T-Shirts and body suits. Check out my other site – www.excessivelydiverted.com. Here is an example …

 I wanted to have a few more styles in my range. Here is one of today’s designs …

 I’ll put this on a body suit – probably use a pink embroidery thread and a pink print fabric. Maybe this very thread and fabric combination. The image is a bit small, but the fabric is spotty pink. I find it hard to resist spotty fabric.