More Embroidery!

I am still doing embroidery, and after liking my floral t-shirt, I decided to do another one. This time, I took a t-shirt that I’d actually planned to discard (I have been doing For Days Take Back bags for clothing that isn’t nice enough to donate) because it has a bunch of holes. I actually have a continuing issue with holes near the waist band of my t-shirts. I think that it’s a combination of thin fabrics rubbing up against the front button and zipper of my jeans over my not-flat stomach, but I am not entirely sure, and it is annoying. Most recently I’ve tried buying more “high quality” (aka expensive) t-shirts to see if that would help, but so far, it hasn’t. The t-shirt in question is comfortable and a pretty pink color, so I decided to try to cover all of the holes with embroidered flowers so that I can continue to wear it. It is. . . still a work in progress. It might end up in the discard pile, after all, but I’m giving it a shot.

Meanwhile, I set it aside because I knew I’d be meeting a new baby in our family soon. My nephew and his wife have a wee one, so I decided to try to do embroidery on some onesies. They are definitely a bit amateurish, with plenty of teensy mistakes, but hey, this was just a little bonus gift, and I figured that if they didn’t turn out to be the cutest, they could still work for napping and spitting up on.

I started with a cartoon dragonfly that I found on the internet after Googling for cartoon bug embroidery. It’s a simple and cute design, and I’d read on the mom’s Instagram post that Baby finds bugs interesting.

The second onesie was the one I was most excited about. My nephew’s in the army, so I wanted to incorporate an image of one of those plastic toy “army guys” in the design, and luckily, pictures were easy to find. I was excited to find an image of the paratrooper because it’s fun and a little less gun-tastic than some of the other images, plus I know that my nephew has done a lot of parachuting out of planes. I made the parachute strings loose, which probably isn’t great in terms of longevity if Baby yanks on them, but it looked so cute and it was so easy that I couldn’t resist. You can’t tell from my picture, but the army onesie is light green, too.

Finally, I only had a bit of time left, but I wanted a more mommy-focused onesie since the army one was daddy-focused. For that, I decided that including the family cats was the way to go. Luckily my sister and brother-in-law could provide a photo of the two cats together to give me a little guidance. I had neither the skills nor the time to embroider life-like images, so instead I hunted down basic cartoons of a baby and a cat, then adjusted the cats in a way that I hoped would be recognizable for the family. What was really awesome was that before she opened the gift, Baby’s mom was saying that it was a bummer that all of the clothing that incorporated cats were really girly-looking and all of the “boy stuff” had dogs instead, since she has a boy in a cat family.

I really like coming up with my own little designs, whether it’s picking the bug’s colors, trying to find an army font, or simplifying something super-complicated. Then, while I’m doing the actual embroidery, I start feeling pretty frustrated and discouraged when I’m about two-thirds of the way in, because all I can see are the mistakes, and fatigue is setting in, and I still have my disappearing-ink outlines, so even the neat parts look a little messy. But then I finish, and I dip it into water to “disappear” the sketches, and I take a little breath, and suddenly all of the horrible mistakes don’t look nearly so bad, and instead I think, “Wow! That’s pretty good!” So: yay.