You wouldn’t believe how many people ask about that colored stripe on these towels! Maybe you were wondering too? It came that way.
I created lettering using the Harrington font and then added knockdown stitches, which can be done with Embrilliance Enthusiast.
You won’t need to do that, you can simply download the ready-made versions of His and Hers.
Designed and made by Lindee Goodall (4/12/2015)
Making fun combinations like this is a cinch with Embrilliance Essentials and even the free Embrilliance Express. Once your font is installed via a simple drag-and-drop process, you’re ready to select it and just type!
Trying to merge in letters one at a time is just ridiculous and is totally unnecessary if you can get your fonts in BX format.
Fonts used: Euforia and Zelda.
Designed and made by Lindee Goodall (4/12/2015)
Month eleven in our year-long Echidna PIE Embroidery Training Program falls in May, which has two birth month flowers: Lily and Hawthorn.
The lily is a symbol of innocence; purity and beauty. The Celtic meaning of the hawthorn tree deals with balance and duality. The hawthorn is also the state flower of Missouri.
This month our focus is on embroidering on terry cloth. This fabric is thick, plush and shifty so it requires special considerations for hooping, stabilizing, and design choice.
Even thread choice can be a factor. For example, if your towels will be exposed to sunlight for long stretches (beach towels) or left damp in a humid bathroom, rayon thread is not the best choice for embroidery.
Applique is the closest thing we have to a “one size fits all” solution in embroidery. That said, there are things we can do to improve it so that a really plush terry doesn’t encroach over the stitching.
I used purchased towels and after embroidering, further embellished them to turn them into designer towels.
Learn more about the training series: Looking for High-Quality Low-Cost Embroidery Education? (Note that the entire series is now bundled into one downloadable product.)
Designed and made by Lindee Goodall (4/10/2015)
The March birth month flower is the daffodil, which is also the tenth-anniversary flower. Daffodils symbolize rebirth and new beginnings and are virtually synonymous with spring.
We’ve been on our journey for nine months and have developed many new skills. Previous months in the Echidna PIE Embroidery Training Series have often required significant investments in time and/or effort so we’ll take a little break this month for lesson 9.
The focus this month is on the stitch and how different stitch types and combinations of stitch types affect the choices you make for hooping and stabilizing and even what fabrics work best.
Our project is an easy one—simply stretch your finished embroidery over a purchased artist’s canvas. These small ones are thicker than larger ones and I’ve finished the edge by hot-gluing a piece of purchased ribbon.
The result is a great piece of wall art that would be a wonderful tie-in with the quilt or the pillow toppers. It’s also a great way to show off that interesting embroidery design you have no idea what to stitch it on!
If you’re looking for a no-sew project that can be stitched in a smaller hoop without requiring precise placement, this is it.… Read the rest
The chrysanthemum is the November birth month flower and also the thirteenth wedding anniversary flower. In general, chrysanthemums symbolize cheerfulness, optimism, wonderful friendship, and enduring love.
This month’s Echidna PIE Training Series lesson is on creating and stitching continuous borders. If you browse through all the projects in the gallery, you’ll find several that have continuous border designs and one that goes crazy with repeats around the perimeter of a cape.
You can make a continuous design out of almost any combination of designs. I like to stick to designs that only have a few colors to keep things simpler at the machine. Also, I like to plan the design so that I’m not having to mirror the designs for the next hooping—just too darn easy to mess up!
This is month 5 and in this lesson, I show you how to build and plan a continuous border design. In some ways, we’re expanding on lesson 2, Perfect Placement.
To keep our project simple, we’ll make a continuous design to embroider on a pillow wrap. While you could do it with paper cut-outs to plan placements, I’ll show you how to do it in a customizing program.
Of course, I’ll be using Embrilliance Essentials and I’m sure you can use a very similar process in other programs.… Read the rest
This was the first project in a year-long embroidery education program I designed for Echidna Sewing in Australia. Based on the Birth month flowers of the year block of the month series, each month I covered a new embroidery topic and created a project to apply those new skills and techniques.
Each month’s download included a lesson, a project with instructions, and the designs used in the project. That series is now complete and has been bundled into one product, Echidna PIE, A Year of Flowers.
Since the ultimate project in the coordinating block of the month series, Birth Month Flowers of the Year, is a Baltimore album style applique quilt, we started with a simple applique project so that participants could be stitching their blocks each month as we went.
This month’s project comes with the applique version of the Australian July Birth Month Flower, Larkspur.
I stitched my pillow topper with the applique version on one side and the redwork or quilting version on the other. (Quilted version is not included with the project files.) This gives me a reversible cover.
This pillow topper concept is one of my favorite techniques because one pillow can get a fresh new look just by changing out the tie-on topper.… Read the rest
When I owned Cactus Punch, we created a lot of richly shaded and detailed realistic designs. These designs were beautiful but… they were high stitch count, high color count, and high distortion designs.
Now I lean toward lighter designs that sew up more quickly and perform better on a wider range of fabrics. This set of purchased artwork was designed for redwork, or outline, style stitching.
You may notice I have a high number of outline designs and it’s because I like them. While they aren’t all that quick to manually digitize, especially the more intricate ones, I like that the play well with other media. I like that they have more opportunity for creativity.
When I started digitizing these roses, I couldn’t resist also digitizing a more realistic version with shading and highlights. I’m generally not a big fan of outlines around fills and avoid them where I can. Here, though, they served a dual purpose by adding definition and providing a travel path for the shading color.
This sample was done for the title slide of my first Craftsy class, Thread Savvy, and combines both polyester and rayon embroidery threads with metallic. It was stitched on a purchased hem-stitched over-sized linen table napkin.… Read the rest
Embroidering on towels presents certain challenges, especially if the towel is terry cloth. For one thing, it can be hard to hoop a thick towel in a small home machine embroidery hoop. Secondly, the terry loops can interfere with the design, especially if the pile is thick and your design is thin.
After I completed roses in this collection, I decided to stitch some on some terry cloth hand towels. The thin satin strokes in these elegant designs were being covered by the terry loops.
One way to deal with that is to bump up the compensation to make the strokes “bolder” or fatter but I prefer to stick to modifications that can be reproduced by most any embroiderer.
My solution was to add a light background “mesh” fill of two layers of light density fill in opposing directions. I digitized these as separate designs and optimized the shape for each of the roses in the set. This is an easy thing to digitize but once again, not everyone has that ability.
When stitched on the towel behind the rose, the mesh fill flattens out the texture and allows the design to be more visible. If you stitch in a color that matches your towel, it virtually disappears.… Read the rest
Fun little pieced and quilted dessert mat with appliqué and redwork cupcakes. Wouldn’t any little girl (or a big one!) love to have a set of these?
For tips on how to make it, see this blog post, Fun & Fast Cupcake Snack Mat Project, linked below.
Watch this video how to customize the design: How to Combine & Customize Embroidery Designs in Embrilliance Essentials
Designed and made by Lindee Goodall (4/9/2014)
This project came about as an answer to my embroidery club participants who wanted an embroidered quilt. I’m sure you know the kind: every block is solidly stitched and then pieced together to create a huge embroidered scene that is so stitch-intensive it could practically stand up on its own.
Just the thought of stitching one of those things makes me feel tired! That is not my idea of something fun and enjoyable.
And not only would it take a long time to design, but it would also take a longer time to digitize, test, and make a sample. And guess who would have to do all that? Me!
When I saw this artwork, though, I knew what I wanted to do with it. It was drawn for color line work and with the details that were in it, you’d still need a really large hoop to do it justice.
By enlarging it even more and splitting it into manageable “window panes,” I could make one of those larger embroidered quilts that was really more quilt-like than one composed of embroidered blocks.
This project includes the “color line” (or “multi-colored redwork”) version and a solid color version. While they do use the same artwork, they are digitized completely separately.… Read the rest
Light-weight, open and airy designs are perfect for smooth fabrics. These designs are single-color and if you choose a matching bobbin thread, they’ll look great on either side of your project.
I chose cotton thread for these purchased linen napkins and coordinated my thread colors with the crocheted edging. These designs are fun and whimsical without looking too cartoony and are perfect for casual spring and summer tables.
Placing a design in the corner the way I’ve done these requires a few tricks.
Designed and made by Lindee Goodall (3/12/2013)
Make an easy cozy fleece throw by adding a pieced and embroidered border and cutting in some fringe.
Ramona Baird designed and made this project with the Bear Paw in the hoop quick project and designs from Winter Teddies. The bear paw block is pieced in the hoop for accuracy. Use your continuous border hoop to stitch the holly border.
Designed and made by Ramona Baird (2/14/2010)