Embroidery Swap

I signed up for an instagram swap called #Bigstitchswap2 being hosted by the lovely Sarah and Cindy of FairyFace Designs and Fluffy Sheep Quilting, respectively.  I've had an instagram account for a while, but I never posted anything, so this was a fun chance to get to use it more.

The swap was for a small piece featuring some amount of hand stitching.  Some people were making pouches, or mini-quilts, or journal covers, etc.  I decided to do a clock, and because I've been on a hand embroidery kick lately, I decided to do some more of that.  Recently, Mary Corbet (of Needle'N Thread) had a sale on her fabulous PDF embroidery books and I picked up her monogram alphabet book.  It's really fabulous, it has great stitch pictures and descriptions as well as instructions for making the letters and suggestions for switching up stitches.  If you're at all interested in embroidery, her website is great.

Anyway, using it as a guide, I stitched up the following for my partner.  I started on the J, then decided it needed a bird, so I stitched that in.  Don't worry about the blue marker in the bird closeup, it's that water-erasable marker and is gone now.  Afterward I pieced the letter into a background, embroidered a clock face and some accent stems, and wrapped the whole thing around a set of 8x10 canvas-covered stretcher bars.  The last step was putting the clockwork in.

I had a fun time working on this, and hope my partner enjoys it!