Owlishly

Fiesta time!

It's done. And matted, and framed.  Now all that's left is giving it to my mom :)

I had to cut the mat myself since the frame was on the longish side and it's a bit wonky, but hopefully that's not noticed too much. It was my first time doing it, so I tried doing it first with some fiskars cutting tool thingy but that wasn't working so well.  I ended up going to Joann's to get a mat cutter, and that worked SO much better.

Last night, I'd finished the embroidery and ended up using pants hangers with the clips to stretch it by hanging it on opposite sides and letting the weight of one hanger pull out the wrinkles after I sprayed it with water. I didn't really want to cut down the fabric either, so what I ended up doing with that was pretty effective in stretching it taut also. I pulled the sides over the back of the frame and sewed it back and forth to stretch the linen across and iron it out.  Then, since that made it pretty messy I used some brown paper from a roll that we have laying around, to glue it to the back of the frame and cover up all the fabric and thread, and general messiness.

Look on for detailed shots, they're kinda dark because for one, I took them at night, and secondly, they're mounted against the dark tan of the back of the frame. Had I had it to do all over again, I would've either gotten thicker linen, or doubled up two pieces of fabric against each other because it was so sheer.

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What do you think? Now I can get back to crocheting!

Redwork, I'm thinking

So, my mom's birthday is on Saturday and as usual, I've sort of waited until the last minute to decide on a gift.  Luckily, no one in my family reads this so I have absolutely no qualms about writing about it before the day. 

I'd been contemplating an embroidered panel of the vintage transfer patterns that I'd bought from PatternBee, a while back.  It's between this one,

or this one,

or this one,

I'm leaning towards the latter, since I like the little boy eating the banana, but I don't like the face of the smallest girl.  I did spill the beans a bit to my mom since I don't even want to bother beginning work on it if she's not going to be interested in it at all.  Her only request was to have boys and girls in it.  Fine by me. 

And now, because I'm lazy and still not quite over being sick, I'm hoping turning it into redwork will be a little easier for me, for a variety of reasons.  First, I don't want to have to think about colors, and not changing color will save some time right?  Second, I think it's an interesting technique and I've been wanting to try it, so why not give it a whirl now.  Third, she likes red; it's the color of all her small appliances & most of her clothes.  Fourth, my sister's baby shower is going to happen the week after we get back from Iowa and they're going to have a fiesta theme (totally stealing my wedding reception idea, but that's something else completely), and that way, since it'll be at my parents house- hey, they'll have even more themed decoration!

I'm also thinking about making a crocheted lace border to fill up white space in the 12x36 in frame that I bought for this purpose.  We'll see, I just really like that thread and want to spend more time crocheting with it, and if I can use it in the gift, all the more reason.

By the way, since I'm totally horrible about bookmarking sites of interest, I'm adding redwork and embroidery ones here for future reference-

Needle'nThread has a video library of stitches & interesting tidbits (lots of ads though, not really my thing).

J.F.Ingalls has a catalog of 1886 embroidery stamping patterns with gobs of scans.

There a Redwork Embroidery Primer over at pretty impressive stuff with tons of links and information, that is indeed pretty impressive.

Anyway, since this is one post I'm writing while the kids are awake, I've got to go!