A New Skill and A New Garment!

                         
I belong to a really neat online sewing group ….. an AMAZING group of women really.  Every one of them an excellent seamstress and each one with her own individuality and style.  We do, as a group, a project every month or two which presents a certain skill to learn or improve upon.  For this project, the skill was using English netting as a lace or insert.  You can see above how I chose to do this!  I made the tucks and lace overlay gown from Martha Pullen’s book, Lovely Lingerie.
                        
For the overlay, which was our group project part, I used a design from Martha Pullen’s embroidery design cd, “Precious Baby”.  I used a Floriani stabilizer, Wet and Gone Tacky (wonderful stuff).  I hooped the stabilizer and then just stuck the English netting onto it, inserted it into the embroidery machine and let it fly!  I used this an an insertion on each side of a central panel of tucks.  After the overlay was constructed, I edged the bottom with some tatting and lace insertion that I had laying around.  I wish I had not used the lace insertion now, but at the time it seemed like a good idea.  If I was going to wear this out in public, I would redo it completely.  But since it is only a night gown for me, I will live with it.  Live and learn is all I can say.
                   
I cut the gown itself from a pink and white plaid fabric from my stash.  It is 100% cotton and while it isn’t exactly a gauzy type of fabric, but reminds me of that kind of.  It has a wonderful hand to it.  Once I had the whole thing constructed, I finished it off with a bias ruffle made of the same plaid.  Delight!  It matches my pink heirloom pillowcases!  LOL.


Enjoy!  Merry Gay

A Safe Place ……

                             
to keep my computer!  This is a project that I did a few months ago in one of the Yahoo Groups that I belong to ….. Martha Pullen Sewing.  We do group projects periodically, always geared to learning a new skill.  This one was lace shaping!  See the lace frame around my name?  That was the lesson we learned.


                                                                                
We picked a nice fabric that we liked from our stash, made a small embroidered panel, learned a new skill,  and made a really useful and pretty item!  It was fun.
Hugs,  Merry Gay

Lounging in Style

                   



Last Sunday afternoon, the Martha Pullen Sisters group hosted a sew along.  We chatted away in our chatroom while we worked on various projects.  Among the projects, one sister was working on a baby dress, another sister worked on a wreath and yet another worked on card table playhouses, just to name a few.  I chose to monogram some old sweatshirts.  Sweatshirts are my favorite thing to wear in the winter.  They are warm and cozy and comfortable.  But they are woefully plain, at least the ones in my drawer.  So I decided to raid my large stash of machine embroidery designs and add a little class to these well worn loved staples of my everyday wardrobe.  I grabbed 3 from my drawer.  

First up, the grey one you see above.  Plain grey, it goes well with jeans or sweat pants in a variety of colors.  However, if I’m not wearing mine with jeans, I would pair it with either a matching grey, a medium grey, or a black pair of sweatpants.  I know, exciting wardrobe!  Hey, but it’s just for lounging in the house or walking trash to the curb!  LOL.  For a monogram, I chose one of my all time favorite monograms, the KK Monogram.  I know that this one comes with the Monogram Wizard, but I use the Brother BES Lettering Software, so I bought mine from  8 Claws and a Paw.  I love it.  Funny how with the monogram it doesn’t feel nearly as sloppy as it did without it.  Or maybe it’s just sloppy chic!  Haha.

On to the next sweatshirt.

                    

For this one I chose the same grey sweatshirt, only for the monogram I used one that I bought a few weeks ago from Anna Bove Embroideries.  I’ve been dying to use this one!  Although I bought it to use on a pair of pillowcases that I have yet to construct, I couldn’t wait until I could construct them and thought it would dress this sweatshirt up nicely.  I would have liked to have added the M and the G on either side of the L, but I tried all kinds of combinations and fonts with this, and it just did not look right.  If you put the smaller fancy letter, it’s too much fancy styling, and if you put a letter with no embellishment on it, it doesn’t look right.  So I just put the L and was done with it.  It’s a only a sweatshirt after all!

                          

Last I pulled a navy blue one out of the pile.  For this one I chose another Anna Bove embroidery and another plain L.  Well….. not a PLAIN L, but a sunflower L!  In hindsight, I think I should have chosen a shirt in a lighter color.  The bright yellow and red shows up nicely on the navy blue, but the darker parts, especially the greens, tend to get lost on the dark blue.  But, like I said before, it’s only an old sweatshirt.  Not even a new one!  And it’s way better than it was before.  Now I can even wear this one with a pair of RED sweat pants!  LOL.  No, don’t even own a pair of those. 

Now I have turned my attention to my button down shirts.  Can you say APPLIQUE’?  But that’s another post.

Enjoy!  Hugs,  Merry Gay

SNOWBOUND!

                          
Please allow me to introduce you to one of my favorite quilts …………. “Snowbound”!  This quilt was featured as a free block of the month on the Bunny Hill website a couple of years ago.  I finished it LAST SPRING and got it quilted and then promptly put it away in my linen closet because it was then Summertime and you don’t want to use a snowman quilt when it’s 100 degrees outside.  But for January, it will be just fine.  All of the snowman blocks are hand applique with embroidered embellishments.  They are pieced together with Irish Chain blocks.  It was totally worth all the time spent I think!

                         

This is a picture I took of it before I started quilting it.  It was laid out on the dining room floor, already sandwiched and ready to pin.  I really do need to take some more pictures of it now that I have it done.  I should have taken them as soon as it was done and don’t know why I didn’t.  But you can see how it looks. 
I have lots and lots of quilts in my closet that I need to share with you.  But for now, enjoy this one!

Hugs,  Merry Gay

Mimi’s Receiving Blanket

                         
Adding to my Grandmother’s Hope Chest, I made this sweet flannel receiving blanket last fall after receiving, as a gift, a machine embroidery design and I needed something nice to embroider. 
   
After completing the embroidery, I crocheted a shell edge with crochet cotton.  There is a space for a name to be later embroidered on the design.  As the blanket is going into my Grandmother’s Hope Chest, and is designated for a baby yet to be born, I didn’t put a name or initials on it.
Enjoy!
Merry Gay

My New Sewing Buddy

                          
Well, not new!  This is Munchkin and he has been my kitty for 15 years.  However,  he never really has been very affectionate.  I suppose the dogs hogged all the lovin and lap time while they were with us.   But as the dogs passed away, he became more of a pet.  And so here he is on his throne.  A pillow that sits next to me on the sofa where I do my hand embroidery and ‘supervises’.  LOL.  But really, he is an angel.  And now, every so often, he will nudge my arm out of the way and move in onto what ever I am working on and demand some lap time, and purrs so very loud! 
 
Hugs,  Prissy

Sew Tweet!

               

Lookie what I found in my mailbox!  A new pattern ……..
                 
No, it’s a new calendar …………. that’s actually a block of the month from ChitterChatter Designs!  Now let’s be perfectly honest.  I have at least 8 quilts in various stages of construction at the moment ……. and at least 3 more being planned.  But how can you resist those sweet little blue birds playing with notions?  Not me!  So, I’m off to the quilt shop to find fabrics.  Mama’s got a new toy!

Enjoy! 
Hugs,  Prissy

Heirloom Baby!

 
Again, adding to my Granadma’s Hope Chest, an heirloom baby gown.  This sweet gown is from Grandmother’s Hope Chest by Martha Pullen.
                         
Sewn from crème color Victorian Batiste, this gown was a pleasure to stitch.  With pin tucks covering the entire bodice, they are embellished with old fashioned double feather stitch and feature a bullion rose at the end of each one.  At the center is a hand embroidered monogram … the letter ‘H’, my sons’ last name.
                          
Just waiting for a baby to wear this special day gown!
Enjoy!  Merry Gay

The Christmas Pillowcases

                          
As many of you know, I love love love to make pillowcases!  These are some I made for my bed this Christmas season and I have enjoyed them so much that I hate putting them away until next year.  The embroidery is simple back stitch.  Easy peasy and it didn’t take long at all.  After the embroidery was finished, I put them together in an evening.  Washed them up and they were ready to go!  The pattern is from Crabapple Hill.
Enjoy,
Merry Gay

Imagine!

                          

My youngest son loves The Beatles.  He loves The Beatles with a passion that borders on infatuation.  So, when he was going through a bad patch about a year ago, I decided that I would  make a Beatles quilt  for him.  It all started with a 45” square of white fabric and a gazillion black applique’s.  (no, I didn’t count the number of pieces it took to make that center medallion) 

                           

Then I pieced a few of these blocks to go around the medallion.

 

And then I began the embroidery for the top portion of the quilt ……….

                         

                         

And then the top was finished.  That done, I didn’t know how I would back it!  So I thought about it and came up with the Octopus Garden!

 

Complete with a couple of Yellow Submarines!  Sweet!  He loved it!

Enjoy!  Merry Gay

New Year, New Blog!

Enough said.  I wasn’t getting along with my old blog and so I got rid of it.  So to kick this new blog off, I am going to share with you one of my favorite projects, my pink Southern Belle Pillowcases.  I blogged about these on the other blog, so if you read that blog, you will remember seeing them there.  But I want to write about them here since they are one of my all time favorite projects.  So here goes……….

These were made using pink pima cotton and an iron on embroidery transfer.  I used DMC floss in a shade that matched the fabric and it took me about 3 weeks to complete the embroidery.  I approached this embroidery as as a sampler type of piece and used a variety of surface embroidery stitches, both as a learning experience and to practice stitches that I already knew.  Because of this, the pillow cases do not match because I didn’t necessarily use the same stitches in the second pillow case as I didn in the first one.  But since I made this a whitework type of project, you can’t really notice unless you look really close.
    
I finished them off by crocheting a dainty shell edging on the edge of the pillowcase using a DMC pearl cotton that matches the thread that I used.  These have turned out to be one of my favorite pairs of pillow cases.  I am planning more and will post them when I finally get around to putting a project together.
Enjoy!
Hugs,  Merry Gay