Use Your Words Embroidery Project, for Audrey!

A while back I saw this quote:

"the real magic wand is a child's imagination"

and it reminded me so much of my oldest daughter, I jotted it down. This describes her to a 't.' She has the most vivid imagination I've ever encountered. One of my favorite 'imagination' stories of hers is the time that she decided it was "Towel's" birthday (Towel is her lovey). She decided that we should have a party for him, complete with cake, to celebrate. We were happy to indulge and did in fact have a birthday party for Towel!

Towel's birthday cake!

When Prudent Baby posted the Use Your Words contest, I immediately knew that I wanted to make something for Audrey with 'her' quote. It seemed that the suitable embellishment for this quote was a magic wand and some swirly stars.

How I Made It. I typed the quote in Word and played around until I found a font that I liked - I choose Papyrus in size 70. I found the magic wand in clip art. I printed these two things out and used Embroidery Tracing Paper to mark the design on the fabric. For the swirly stars, I just free handed this because I knew I wanted it to be round swirls with different sizes and types of stars.

The embroidery tracing paper method was really easy - you do not have to print in reverse or anything fancy ... simply lay your design over the tracing paper (with the powdery side of the tracing paper work on the right side of the fabric) and use a ball point pen to trace over the design. This process marks the fabric with the design and you just stitch over it.


It's kind of hard to see, but here's the full design traced onto the sparkle fabric - using embroidery tracing paper

 I choose silver fabric with sparkles on it (I believe it's called Fairy Dust) because it was so fitting for this magical / starry design.

The embroidery took me a while (longer than I anticipated) but this was so worth it! I LOVE how the design turned out and am so encouraged to know that working with tracing paper is so easy, and that you can pretty much embroidery any design perfectly when you trace it out this way. :)

Here are some close ups of the embroidery:

I didn't want to make wall art with this; I opted for a pillow. So, I started rummaging in my stash and found some fabric scraps that complimented the colors of the embroidery thread and 'framed' the design with it.

This is an envelope style pillow with a hot pink back. The pink / orange diagonal stripe fabric is Riley Blake's Summer Song; I had this leftover from another project and I just *barely* had enough!

This pillow is SO my daughter and I hope this is something she cherishes for a long time. She's an inspiration for creativity and just letting your mind run with ideas and all its unabashed craziness. I love her for it and she makes me crack up at least once a day with her antics. She was pretty thrilled to get her own special pillow (especially after her little sister got the first pillow I made). Thanks dearest daughter for the inspiration and glad you love your pillow!

For fun ... I just got Photoshop (woah, new potential addition!) and had fun playing around with these (same picture 5 ways)...