Sunday, January 19, 2014

The embroidery bandwagon

Maybe I should be embarrassed that this colorful bowl full of untangled embroidery floss is my greatest accomplishment of the year so far, but I'm not.  I'm just not.  I mean, do you SEE how knot-free and undisgusting all that thread is?

If you want to experience a little of yesterday's journey, unwind 27 skeins of emroidery floss and mix with three balls of unrolled yarn.  Add cut up scraps of fabric, felt and bias tape.  Now wrap the whole cluster in long strips of velcro.  Velcro, my people!!!  The hook side, not the loop side.  Of course.  It was so scarring I couldn't bring myself to photograph it.  The fear of committing a crime against humanity if I forced you to look at it was too strong.

Anyway, why am I talking about embroidery?  Because Jenna, of course.  She has used her magical witchcraft to woo us all into hand embroidering our way out of our respective winter funks and so here I am with too many close up pictures of thread before I actually start the project.  Everyone knows that the prepping and photographing of a project is 75% of the work, so really I'm almost finished!  Even though...um...I haven't started.

Ahem.

Focus!  So you could use these little cards to wind your floss, which you can find at your favorite craft or hobby store,


but I'm impatient and cheap and didn't have enough cards so I done got me out some clothespins and went to work.  Occasionally the upper 40% of my child army would offer their assistance, so we were finished in a mere seventy-nine hours.  Give or take.



Now, Jenna has a sweet tutorial on using a transfer pen to get your pattern onto your fabric, but, you guessed it, I am cheap and lazy and didn't have the requisite supplies, so I used a fabric pen and a stencil to get the little butterfly onto the shoulder of the dress.

Okay fine.  Lie.  Lizzy used the pen and the stencil.  Delegation, baby.

Hah!  A whole post about not even starting a project!  New levels of blogging foolery have been reached.  I'll just call this a tutorial for sorting and storing your embroidery floss or something.  Yeah.  That's totally what this is. 

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14 comments :

  1. Hahaha! Yay! All you pictures look beautiful :)

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  2. I learned this trick a couple of years ago - it has saved me a whole lot of heartbreak!

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  3. I'll probably be getting back on the embroidery wagon soon - but winter means knitting in these parts. So I'm knitting fast and furious - embroidery my summer craft ;)

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  4. So smart- I need to try out the clothespin trick on my nightmare of embroidery floss basket!

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  5. I am still impressed by my self restraint in jumping on this wagon but your post about not actually starting is making me want to not actually start right along with you.

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  6. a. clothespins are entirely more charming
    b. get it, gurl
    c. we need to get Carrie and her brood up here and have a stichin' partayyyy

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  7. Only you can blog about embroidery without actually showing us any embroidery and have it be so darned entertaining!

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  8. That's a really nice pot you have the embroidery floss in. Reminds me of when the pottery students used to sell their wares at U.D.

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  9. You are way too funny! How can someone make untangling thread amusing? You did it! When you write a book about absolutely anything I plan to buy 100 copies for all my friends.
    Jeanette, shamelessly using son's google account

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  10. You crack me up. I did a post last week where I just dumped a bunch of posts still in draft mode into a post and hit publish, and this is like the embroidery equivalent of that.

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  11. You are the blogging, female, more wholesome version of Seinfeld. A blog about nothing that everyone loves. Except you have great tips, because those clothespins of thread are awesome. They look so nice, I wouldn't even be able to use them, just leave them on display on the coffee table.

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    Replies
    1. This is true. They're way prettier than those little cards. If you didn't get the idea from Pinterest, you gotta Pinterest this post, Dwij.

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  12. I love these beautiful pictures! I agree that you are 75% done since you certainly couldn't even start without all that organizing. Do post pictures when you are finished!

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