Embroidered Card

A couple of weeks ago, I received an invitation to a mail-in baby shower for my cousin who is expecting her first baby. I made her a hooded towel following my tutorial here and totally forgot to take a picture of it so you could see it-Sorry!

After I wrapped the gift and got it ready to mail, I realized I had forgotten to buy a card. With 5 children, running out to buy a card did not appeal to me. So I decided to make one.

I have been completely inspired by Aimee Ray's embroidery books: Doodle Stitching and Doodle Stitching: The Motif Collection. The Motif Collection has been wonderful in particular because you receive a disk with all of the designs on it that you can mix and match to make your own composition. But both books, have inspiring ideas of things you can embroider. One of the ideas in the books was to embroider gift tags. I expanded on that idea a bit and ended up embroidering a blank card.

I can't tell you how much fun I had creating this card. I printed off the design using my computer printer and then held the card over the design on a window so that I could see the lines and softly traced it onto the blank card. I'm so high tech you know.

Embroidering on paper has its problems because you can't see where your needle is going to poke through.

Now here is the key to doing this project that I figured out with much trial and error: Poke tiny holes in your outline with your needle so that you can embroider with a running stitch just like the sewing or lacing cards that kids like to do.

This method would only work with a running stitch though so if you are wanting to do the backstitch you would have to be a bit more careful and hold you project up to the light so that you can see the outline on the back of the paper and then carefully push on the needle until you see a bump on the front of the paper. If it is in the right spot you would continue to stitch, if not try again.

It would actually be a great beginning project for a child who is learning to embroider, but there was no way I was giving my project over to one of my children this time because I selfishly wanted to do it myself. But it would be a great idea for a grandparent's birthday card or maybe a Mother's day card.

The nest is not fully embroidered. I embroidered a few of the twigs and then traced the remaining twigs with a brown colored pencil. It was just a bit too many twigs to do easily on card stock.