Wednesday, August 31, 2011

A design out of Mains Merveiles

Last night, I was browsing through the pages of Mains Merveiles, and this cute design caught my attention.

I immediately started digitizing it, which is not a norm because I am a big hoarder; I always save things for later, waiting for the right moment. But, I try to remind myself these days that I need to create my happy moments.

The design came out perfect and I made it into a door hanger. My dh is coming back after a long trip and I will not be home to receive him, so it will serve as my welcome note - wink!


Read more about this magazine here:

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Fancy Fills in Machine Embroidery

When Mary asked me to offer a class in fancy fills with PSW2.0 I was ecstatic. Way back in late 80's, one evening as I was browsing through some clearance sales of books at a local grocery store, I found this book that had a picture of a beautiful shadow work embroidery on white cotton organdy. This design alone was worth the price of the book. I would have started on the embroidery right away except that I did not have the white organdy. Remember, this was before the internet era where you could google 'organdy fabric' and pull out your credit card and place a mail order. Coming weekend and every other weekend after that whenever I would call up my mil I would remind her to buy several mitres of the material. A couple of years later my dh had an opportunity to visit home and he brought back my treasure. My mind was at peace at last!

Shadow work from the book

In the last 20+ years I have done a lot of embroidery work, but I never got around to do this fall shadow work simply because I had the material and I kept telling myself - I can start any day! Long past are the days when I would work meticulously on hand embroidery.  I am now a proud owner of SingerXL 6000 and armed with the digitizing software. I finally took upon the task of creating the design - just that this was a mock shadow work. The digitizing was rather simple with some amount of editing, but it took 20+ hoopings to finish the project.

Finally I have my white organdy runner with fall leaves scattered all over ready for fall decoration. This will also be my tutorial for the upcoming design class at the local store.

My table runner