T-Shirts

If you haven't noticed, I've gotten really excited about doing applique on my embroidery machine lately.  I found some fun websites that have such cute applique designs and now I want to put them on everything. :)

This past June I decided I would make Bubbo a shirt for his birthday.  I let him look through one of the websites and pick out a design.  He found a drum set that he really liked.  So, we went to the fabric store and picked out fabric together.  His favorite color is green so it was only natural that we gravitated toward some green fabric.  We found what you see below on the drum set and decided we liked it.  But, he also found some maroon camo fabric that he really liked.  I just couldn't put the lime green fabric with maroon, so I told him I would make him a football helmet shirt with the maroon fabric for Aggie football season.  

 When you have a boy that's this cute, you kinda want to make him whatever he wants. :)

 Here's the football helmet applique that I did on his shirt.

 I think I'll keep him.

Sock Monkey Applique

Several years ago I saw this super cute sock monkey applique tutorial shirt on Angela's blog.  I fell in love with it and filed it away in my "to make someday" folder.  Then along came time to plan MM's first birthday party (last May, I'm posting a little late).  Hmm, what kind of theme should I go with?  I have kind of become a huge sock monkey fan in the last couple of years and thought it would make a fun theme.  Plus it's perfect because one of MM's nicknames is Monkey Man.

So, I made a little sock monkey bunting to hang on the wall...

Made a monkey birthday cake...

 Made a sock monkey for the birthday boy...

And finally made the sock monkey applique shirt that I had bookmarked years before...

I think the shirt is so cute, but even cuter when worn by this little guy...

A Look Back at 2012

Even though I wasn't very active on my blog, I was pretty active in my sewing room. Here is a sampling of what I worked on in 2012:

Did some appliques on shirts and other things.

 Did much more customer orders in 2012 than in 2011.  I'm finally getting my name out there a little bit. :)

 Embroidered different items including capes, shirts, and stockings.

 Improved my digitizing skills, including an actual customer logo that I digitized.

 Made quite a few key chains.  Gave some away and actually sold some too.

 Embroidered on quite a few towels - hooded and just plain towels.

Overall it was a good year.  I enjoyed most of the work I did and I love being able to do more things for customers.  I'm hoping 2013 allows me even more time in my sewing room and more opportunities to sell my work.

Flashback Friday - A Blanket

Many years ago (like 8), I was pregnant with 3 friends. Two of us were having our first babies and one was having her third child. I was doing very basic sewing back then and made this blanket for one of the new babies. I'm pretty sure I made one for the other baby too, but I can't find any pictures of that one. I still make these simple, 1 yard by 1 yard blankets sometimes, but my choice of fabric has gotten much more interesting.

And even though my photography skills still need a lot of work, I think I've gotten a little better at staging my products. :)

PJ Style

Several years ago I bought some really fancy embroidery software.  It does all sorts of things that I still haven't figured out.  I use it (at least in little ways) on almost every embroidery project I do.  But, one of the major capabilities of it is digitizing.  This is taking an image and making it into a file that my embroidery machine can use.  I have done some work with this aspect of the machine, but never much that I've been very happy with.  A couple of months ago, Super D told me about a friend of his that writes children's books.  He had a logo that he wanted digitized and sewn out onto some polo shirts.  I gulped and said send me the logo.  He sent it to me and it looked relatively simple, so I decided I would give it a try.  I digitized it, sewed out a sample, and showed it to the customer.  He was happy with it and asked me to embroider it onto 5 polos.  I just finished them last week.  He came and picked them up and brought me 10 more polos.

Here is the logo I was digitizing:

 And here is the logo sewn out on a polo shirt:

Feel free to check out PJStyle.com to see what my customer is up to.

Flashback Friday

I had a request to bring back Flashback Friday's now that I'm blogging semi-regularly again.  So, here are the first two hooded towels that I made.  This was before I had my own embroidery machine - I was using my mom's.  It's fun to do the designs on the different color towels, but much easier for orders and stuff to just keep things on white.

 This little hippo that I did was the first time I tried out applique on the embroidery machine.  It wasn't perfect, but I think it's so cute.  I've learned a lot since I made these towels.  I think I made these in 2005.

Embroidered Towels

Here are some towels that I embroidered for a customer. The light colored towels are the husband and wife, and the dark towels are for their 5 boys!

And a close up of the one for the Mama!

Hopefully with a house full of boys, this will help everyone keep their towels straight. :)