Embroidered Doll Ornaments

 

Hi everybody, I just wanted to jump in today and share about some hand embroidered doll ornaments I just finished up.  These were kits for embroidered dolls put out by kiriki press, and they are all adorable.  I don't usually buy kits, but one of these was a present a friend gave and one was one my mom bought for Anna to make, but she wasn't interested.  If she gets more into hand sewing later, I'll definitely get her another one.

The kits are great, all adorable little animals, and the kit includes everything you need to make the doll except a needle, scissors, and embroidery hoop.  In addition to the materials, each kit also includes an instruction sheet and little colored card with photographs of the finished doll.

The instructions don't have directions for the individual stitches, so if you're new to embroidery, you'd need to go online and find instructions.  However, the kiriki website has a good downloadable stitch dictionary and of course there are many online.  The kits are staged by level based on the amount of the doll covered in stitches and I happened to have a level 1 and level 3 kit.

The dolls finish at about 4.5" high, and I like that the shape to embroider is printed on a fairly large piece of fabric so it fits well in a 6" embroidery hoop.  I hate when the fabric is too small and you have to stitch on extra bits to fit it in the hoop.

Here you can see the otter in-progress.

Here's the finished koala. You can see he isn't too covered in stitching, and he stitched up pretty fast.  They are meant to finish up as stuffed dolls, but I don't really need any dolls so I added a little hanging ribbon so I can use him as a Christmas ornament.

The backs are just plain, but I decided to stitch the year since I like to have that on my ornaments.

And here's the otter.  You can se he's entirely covered in stitching, so of course he took a bit longer, but even so it wasn't difficult.  None of the stitches were particularly complicated and the instructions were clear.  I'm not that great about sewing smooth curves (during assembly) but that's just me.

These were fun to work on, a good evening project while watching TV.  I am glad to have made them and not have unused kits for things in my studio!

I Like #257

 Welcome to another week of things to like!  I drove home to New Mexico this weekend to return my mom's car to her after finally getting mine back.  She was glad to have it and it was great to see my parents and other family.

Lovely sunset on the drive home.

It was a short trip, but we still had time for a morning hike with the dogs.

My parents always have the best flowers; right now that means wonderful iris and some flourishing and fragrant lilacs.

I helped my mom plant the rest of her container garden; unfortunately the wind there is so bad right now I'm not sure anything we planted will survive.  Hopefully the stuff from seeds will be ok at least.

We transplanted and separated this barrel cactus.  It's one of the ones I started from seed and then gave to my mom.  It really really loves the room where she has it; hers is at least five times bigger than any of the ones I still have growing.  It was bursting out of the pot; I hope it survives having been transplanted.

I was thrilled to get to go down and see my Grandma; my Aunt hosted a lovely Mother's day lunch for the family and it was good to visit and catch up with everyone.

Blue and Spooky are staying in New Mexico for a few weeks while I have some work-related travel.  They love it there (more than at home for sure), but I really miss them.

One final exciting thing, I received this wonderful fish sculpture from the "Fresh Fish" exhibit that was part of SAQA's annual conference.  I'm so excited, it's called "Mermaid Snack" and is by artist Karen-Eve Bayne, from North Carolina.  It's so delightfully fun and there are so many wonderful things to see the more you look at it.

It was lovely to see family this week, and I hope there have been good things in your life this week too. Click over to Lee Anna's for more things to like!

I Like #256

 Welcome to another week of things to like!

It's a bit hard to like anything right now after the horrifying (but I guess not surprising) leaked draft Supreme Court Ruling.  Let's just set the clock back 50 years why don't we?  It's just horrible horrible horrible horrible.

In other news,  this week has been the annual SAQA virtual conference, and that has been wonderful.  It kicked off with an amazing keynote speech by artist Janet Echelman.  Her work is absolutely amazing, and if you haven't seen it before, I encourage you to check it out.

Janet Echelman, Earthtime 1.78 Vienna (https://www.echelman.com/#/178-vienna/)

The SAQA conference in general has been really great.  Lots of great talks, studio tours, lightning talks, chatting/networking/friend making sessions, etc.

Also a couple of really good things on the forefront for some of my artist friends:

Kathy Suprenant (also a cell biologist scientist) currently has a solo show at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum called What Did Ming Miss.  I'm so excited for her, it's a really great group of pieces, and she's giving a free, open-to-the-public Zoom talk about it this Sunday May 8, at 3PM ET.   I'd encourage you to go if you're available, it should be really cool!  You can read more about the series and pieces in the show here.

Mother’s Day Tribute to Ming the Clam (even clams have mothers)

Sunday at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum

Date:  Sunday, May 8, 2022 

Time: 3:00 PM Central Time

Zoom Link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88958141478?pwd=QmwyZTNwUm5penp1YUNIdVpxMUJhQT09

In European quilt news, my friend Jette Clover has a solo show for the month of May at the Galerie Zone-Galerie Voor Kunst en Vormgeving in Leiden in the Netherlands.  If any of you are going to be traveling in that area this month, definitely stop in and see it, her work is wonderful.

In more local news,  Cash came over to play with Spooky this week and all three dogs had a great time.  Spooky and Blue are going to New Mexico this weekend to stay for the rest of the month while I have some work travel, so it was good to get to play with Cash some more before going.  Blue was there too- he just didn't get in the picture.

I made very tasty cupcakes for the occasion, I love this chocolate cake recipe.

We've had three days with severe/tornado weather this week, and I just got my TV fixed so I can watch regular local channels (rather than just netflix) which is nice, because on severe weather nights you just leave the live weather guy on for hours in case you need to go to the shelter.  We've been lucky so far, but there were several tornados causing quite a bit of damage last night, but not very close to us.

The dahlias in this garden bed are growing pretty well.  It'll still be quite a while before they bloom, but I'm glad they'd gotten fairly established before this week of terrible storms.

And! The most exciting thing to happen was I got my car back this week!  I'm so excited!  I had to clean out my garage so I could get both cars in there (see above tornado/hail weather), but I'm just glad to have it back.  I'll be returning my mom's car to her soon.

I hope you guys are finding some things to keep your days a little bright if you can!  Click over to LeeAnna's to join the group.