Kelee: Valentine's Day Hat

My little girl is all about pink and hearts and love and glitter, so Valentine's Day is right up her alley. Of course, so is Thanksgiving because she always gets the two confused and has been thankful "for passing out hearts" for the past three Thanksgivings. She's a pretty rocking little girl so when I made her a new hat with the pink yarn she picked out, she also asked for me to make a mohawk on it. Or a fauxhawk. Or a yarnhawk.

If you haven't made these before, it is easy enough. You just make tassels pointing up. She's been wearing the hat contentedly for a while now, but with Valentine's Day coming up, I got tempted to heart it up. It turned out to be easier and cuter than I'd expected. First I cut out a heart from some felt.

I put a few drops of some fabric glue on it and stuck it to the hat then embroidered on it. I would recommend, however, that you skip the glue and do the decorative embroidering before you attach it to the hat. I had to sew through the glue in some parts and it was really hard to do.

Apple couldn't help but to be lured into the embroidering of her own heart. In the traditional reclined position of an expert embroiderer. 

I ended up with the all my thread ends and stranding on the inside of the hat. If you embroidered the heart first and then attached it with some decorative yet functional outlining of the hat, that would be enough to secure the heart onto the hat and it look better on the inside of the hat. If you are concerned with that sort of thing.

It looks great on her giant head and is the perfect mix of sweetness and rocking - just like my little girl.

 I embroidered the word "love" in cursive because I love writing in cursive. That's not really why. I was hoping it would look tattooey. The girlchild embroidered "love" and "mama" on her own purple felt heart. Sniff. Sniff.

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Kelee: Embroidering Dreams

It's not that I am not crafting, it's just that I'm sort of in between crafts. I have a couple of big deals in the works, though. In this time of transition between the two clays and the yarns, I have been doing a lot of soul searching, And nose blowing because I've also had a cold.
Back in October, I decided to try to embroider. The Girlchild drew a very lovely picture of our dog Stella, and then picked out some thread. I traced the picture on the shirt with a washable marker and followed one of 400+ tutorials that I read and used the back stitch.
Miraculously, she's been wearing it ever since, and it didn't fall apart in the washer.


I really enjoyed the whole event and decided to relive the wild ride this week. I started with another drawing by the Shegirl on my pillowcase. A very lovely pink and purple horse.


Then I moved on to the HusbandBen's pillowcase. He relented to let me embroider it on the condition that I would embroider his Stratocaster. He found a copy of it in the Musician's Friend catalog of embroider patterns.
I traced it with a Sharpie so I could sort of see it through the fabric, and then I traced it on with a pen. If Ben's version of this guitar was the nearly $4000 version, by the way, it'd have been long since pawned.
I used the split stitch for this one, French knots for the tuning knobby things and for the volume knobby things, and can you see that I even put on those little black dots on the fretboard. By the way, those spots that look like dirt on the pillow case are, in fact, dirt. I had the pillow case delicately strewn across my couch as I was admiring my own handiwork when the very same dee-oh-gee (from the original t-shirt embroidery fame) came in from the outdoors and immediately wiped her muddy little paws on the pillowcase with total disregard for my handiwork.
So while I'll be dreaming of horse riding through the fluffy pink clouds while eating cotton candy, Ben will dream of rocking out in front of millions of admiring fans, becoming addicted to the dope, std-infested groupies, bankruptness, and a slow descent into obscurity. Cool.