Craft day love....Embroidery!

I admit this only to you wonderful blog readers, and my very understanding friends in the club,  I was a bit queasy about this months' Craft Club venture into embroidery.  I had done a bit of embroidery in my past craft lives, a touch of lettering here a bit of edging there, nothing substantial mind you, but enough of it to think it was not all that thrilling creativity wise. So when a project that centered around embroidery popped up as the selection I was on the pins and needles about it.  I knit, sew, cook, and am very proud of all things creative that I do, but embroidery seemed "too girly" for me.  I assumed we would be doing samplers like the ladies in the proverbial Sense and Sensibility world that involved lots of roses and professions of love to our favorite gentlemen callers.   Please do not wring your Lily of the Valley hand embossed handkerchiefs with gold filigree edging at this statement, read on until the end, it gets better.

I could not have been more wrong about this wonder of fabric and floss.  I cannot think of a single girl I knew in elementary school that did not have a floss collection the size of a Barbie dream house.  We made unending amounts of friendship bracelets and the like, twisting and threading, pulling so tight that you almost ripped a hole in whatever article of clothing you had the safety pin anchored to.  I fully believed as a child that that was the end all be all use of the floss, an inexpensive craft that I could give whoever was my BFF at the time. Not so, as I learned from my blog partner and another one of the Craft Club members, Laura.

See, these two fine women have known the glory of a craft that seemed too old fashioned to be of any use and too simple to be pretty.  Embroidery is at once simple to master and endlessly creative, quite a difficult feat for a craft that uses needle and floss.  Not to be boxed in with stuffy patterns none of us would like, Anita showed how to use tracing paper and a pencil, with carbon paper over our fabric of choice, we could turn any drawing into a pattern for our mobile canvas.  Laura had brought some embroidery books she had checked out from the library, what a great source of inspiration,  and one had some fun modern animals that we quickly set to tracing.  We had two very French looking kitties, a hedgehog, an owl, and a dog.  These smaller projects were to get us used to the process and some of the different stitches available in the embroidery arsenal. Anita gave us all a copy of The Pocket Stick Book from Sew Mama Sew for us to get our feet wet.  So we clipped and stitched and oohed and ahhed through Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone and Best in Show and finished up our trial runs. Very nicely done ladies, but it seems that between our slowness and lack of confidence, not to mention a large break in the middle to have a mini crawdad boil for dinner, only one of us got to move on to her big project.

Katy, Sarah, and Laura had all picked out kitchen towels to embroider for themselves.  Katy, always the dominator of crafts, I swear she can do three of whatever it is in the time it takes the rest of us to do one, got to start on a flirty set of mermaid towels.  I hope she does the one of the pissed off mermaid caught in the net.  Anita finished her adorable Sadie, as seen below, and pulled out an embroidery quilt that she had started quite a bit ago and settled in to work on that.  I am going to use this new fangled fun to make some holiday gifts for two of couples in my life that I have always wanted to craft for but never could think of what to give them. Thank you embroidery!

A very good Craft Club indeed.  Thanks to both Anita and Laura for their patience and guiding hand. Even my husband though my little owl was cute, so you know those ladies know how to teach.
Here's to next month's Craft Club fun......bring it on!

Keeping it threaded,
Kelly, the origami ninja 

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