Monogrammed Hankies

From the time they were old enough to wipe their own noses, my grandchildren have always used hankies instead of tissue. I love that. Not very many people use hankies anymore - I wonder why.

There are some beautifully monogrammed and embellished hankies out there that certainly should not be used for its intended purpose, but the kids love and use hankies all the time.

I bought hankies for each of them and monogrammed their first initial in the corner. Here's how they turned out.

That should just about take care of the 2011 Christmas projects I needed to complete before starting this year's projects.

Hmmm, what should I start next?

Looking Forward to 2012

Well, it looks like we all survived crafting during the holidays. I know I made a ton of fun things for friends, family, and especially grandchildren. There were bags made for gifts, superhero capes, pillows, aprons, centerpieces, and more.

It was a blast and I thoroughly enjoyed using both of my new machines this year to make these wonderful projects. The Bernina and Babylock serger made sewing/quilting/home dec projects quick and easy and beautiful.

In 2012, I've joined four groups that involve monthly projects: A hand stitched crazy quilt block; a free motion quilt block; a strip quilt block, and a monthly machine embroidery class. It will be a busy year for me but these are things I really hope to accomplish to improve my quilting skills.

What are your stitching plans for 2012?

Machine Embroidery Tips Recently Learned

I learned a few new things while I was stitching out the six designs for the Christmas wallhanging.

Metallic thread can be a little tricky, LOL. As everyone knows, it wants to curl as it comes off the spool and not feed correctly through the machine. I tried placing the spool higher and lower, in the front, in the back, and off to the side and a number of other ideas to try to keep the thread coming off evenly at a constant speed without curling too much. I even bought a separate attachment for my machine but I couldn't get it to fit correctly so I'm taking it back this afternoon.

Finally, this is what I ended up doing. For any given area of the design where metallic thread is used, there are usually only 500 to maybe 3,000 stitches to the next thread change. I unwound some thread from the spool - just using my best guess of length, and ran it gently through my hand to kind of relax the curl. Then I rewound it back onto the spool. I placed the spool on the table just to the right of the machine and almost directly underneath the spool holder. I ran the thread up through the two loops at the top and then straight into the machine and manually threaded the needle. I never had any problems stitching after that. I'm using a Titanium Organ needle and it seems to work just fine with metallic thread.

It may sound like a little extra work but for me it's better than having to stop and re-thread the top and bobbin thread every time it breaks during the stitch-out of a design.

The other thing I figured out was that these designs stitched out much prettier if I used extra stabilizer. I know, I've seen many videos and heard many people say that it's all about the stabilizer and I believe that. What I didn't pick up on was that it isn't just the type of stabilizer but also the number of layers. I learned while stitching out these six panels, that my machine combined with these designs, stitched much better and looked much nicer if I used three or four layers of stabilizer depending on the density of the stitches.