Embroidery adventures

I've been wanting to try some more embroidery, on a small scale, so when I received an invitation to my niece's baby shower I decided to try my hand at embellishing some little onesies.



This endeavor turned out to be more tricky than I expected. I tried every manner of transfer for the designs but none were completely satisfactory. And the smaller the design, the harder it became to get a clear image on the t-shirt fabric. I finally got an acceptable design to follow by using a Clover transfer pen. I also tried using some Super Solvy fabric stabilizer on the back of the onesie, but I became frustrated with it and abandoned its use after completing the first design.



My other challenge with these tiny designs was the stitching itself. I generally use a basic outline stitch, but on these designs it was much trickier than I expected. I ended up with a mixture of outline and running stitches, but I still wasn't completely satisfied. I did, however, finish all three and popped them into the mail yesterday. Whew!



Now, back to knitting!

Runaway teapot

I've been intrigued with all the lovely embroidery I've been seeing lately in blogland, enough so that I took a little side trip in my crafting time to work on this.



My skills are a little rusty, but not too bad...a least when I'm trying the simple stitch patterns! This teapot probably could've benefited from a few more colors, but I guess I was playing it safe in not mixing up things *too* much. This was one of many cute kitchen iron on transfers found in this set. They are simple heat transfer designs, which I still find to be easiest.

I actually purchased a couple of iron-on transfer pencils for some cowgirl designs I want to do, but had no success in getting a good transfer. I went over the pattern several times with the pencil before ironing, but the image never showed up. Any advice from the embroidery pros out there? What's the best way to get images onto fabric?