Moving the blog

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Digitized cross stitch

Here’s a cross stitch design I digitized.

ITH Zipper Pouch

I adjusted my zipper pouch design to be a little wider, here’s another one I made that is just over 5″ wide. These are fun to make, but I want more sizes, like one wide enough to fit a knitting stitch gauge, and maybe another one to fit my crochet hooks in an organized manner.

Test stitch-outs

Here are a couple of test stitch-outs I did yesterday. The first one was supposed to be a letter T from a cross stitch Christmas alphabet freebie. It was a dismal fail with 3 thread breakages in that little bit that I stitched before cutting my losses. Plus, the cross stitch look wasn’t to my taste either. In the recycling bin that alphabet goes!

The second one is a gorgeous letter G, from the Small Crowns alphabet by Sonia Showalter. It stitched up beautifully with no thread breakages, in the same hoop with the same (cheap) thread as the first design. Conclusion? Quality counts! Since these are just test stitch outs, I use scrap fabric, cheap thread and a hasty hooping job. But it seems a quality design will still look good despite all those things. Can’t wait for the rest of that alphabet to be released.

Another ITH zipper pouch

I wanted to make another zipper pouch, but a bit bigger this time. This one I digitized myself, as I had to make it small enough to still work with my stash of 7″ zippers.

Here it is next to the smaller one for scale.

Little zipper pouch in the hoop

I made this cute little pouch to store earbuds, and I did it entirely with my embroidery machine (no sewing!). After spending way too much time online looking at different options, I found this FREE Zip Case In the Hoop project. It includes the machine embroidery file and a pdf with very detailed instructions. The instructions are easy to follow, the only thing is I didn’t use much tape to secure my project down, and I made sure that my machine wouldn’t be stitching through any pieces of tape.

If you are curious about what the process looks like, there’s a video at Katie’s Quilting Corner blog.

Here’s another one I made. This one was made without the quilting stitches and batting. They are quick and fun to make, and I’m now on the hunt to find more In The Hoop zipper pouches in different sizes.

Burp cloths with machine embroidery

I made these as a baby shower gift and I’m pretty happy with how they turned out. I used this Burp Cloth Tutorial as a guide on how to make the burp cloths.

Supplies:

• Natural cotton flannel
• Embroidery thread (Gutermann 9720) and regular thread for sewing the burp cloths
• Quilting cotton pieces for the applique
• Anja Rieger Design Dressed up Pack No. 7 and Dressed up Pack No. 4
• Water soluble stabilizer

Finished zig zag quilt

Yes, it took me way too long to post these photos. But here they are finally! Made this quilt as a gift, followed the Crazy Mom Quilts – Make a Zig Zag Quilt tutorial.

A quilt

Here is a sneak peek of what I have been working on…

Learn about wool

Craftsy has a free class called Know Your Wool that I would highly recommend to any knitter. It’s a great introduction to the different characteristics of wool from different sheep breeds. Before watching the videos (while working on my Tomten of course), I had no idea that certain breeds produced a wool that is resistant to felting. I feel like I now need to track down some of that yarn, but it’s not proving to be very easy. It’s seriously making me consider signing up for a spinning and dyeing class in the fall…