On the Cover ~ 'Berry' Sweet Indeed!

My Applique Strawberry design is featured on the cover of Sew Beautiful Magazine!

Issue # 142, 2012  Vol.26, #3

My design was also used on a shirt too in the article.

It's a really cute issue full of great baby ideas and a few free patterns.

You can find my Applique Strawberry design here:

http://www.embroiderygarden.com/store/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=467

Memory Bears

One of my uncles died back in December. He was my favorite :)

My aunt came to visit recently and brought me several of his shirts.

She wants me to make bears for each of their grandkids from them. There are 2 boys & 3 girls.

Here are the bears I made for the boys.

I used an old McCalls pattern (#2271)

I cut the collars off the shirts and hemmed the bottom edge of them.

They buttoned around the neck and fit perfectly.

My uncle was a volunteer fireman. His fireman patches are sewn on the bellies :)



I sewed pockets from the shirts onto the back side of the bears.

My aunt will write notes to each of the kids and put a photo of them with my uncle inside the pocket.

I think they turned out pretty special. They went out in the mail today.

I'll start the ones for the girls soon. I'm thinking about adding raggy flowers to them using leftover scraps.

Butterflies x 3

I used shadow boxes to create these dimensional butterfly scenes.

The butterfly silhouettes were cut on my Cricut from cardstock. I ran them through a Cuttlebug to emboss some with swirls and some with dots.

I could have cut the branches from vinyl using my Cricut, but I cheated a bit :)

JoAnn's has pre-cut vinyl designs and I saw one that was a close match to the design in the sheers in my daughter-in-laws office / spare bedroom. I use a 50% off coupon and bought it for $7.00.

I then took it and cut the branch into 3 main pieces and a couple of smaller ones.

I cut textured white artist's posterboard (also from JoAnns) to fit the back of the shadow boxes.

I applied the vinyl branches to the posterboard.

A small crease in the middle of each butterfly gave it some dimension and a small round sticky dot lifted it slightly off the posterboard.

They look really nice in person. The butterflies are in shades of purple and silver and black.

Hung on the purple wall, the frames really pop.