Paint & stitch owl

By the time I started thinking about creating cards for the twins, I had already made a handful of embroidered cards this year, and I was keen to make some more. However, I am also very practical and I was painfully aware that I would have another six cards to make in the weeks after I’d done the ones for the twins. There was no way I would have the time to put in as much work on the next eight cards as I had done on the previous three.

I needed to come up with a faster process that would still allow me to create something that I was happy with. And so I made the first of my paint and stitch cards.

By necessity this involved a bit of trial and error. For once, I was sensible and actually tried out a few different paints before adding colour to the design I had transferred. Eventually, I settled on Pebeo fabric paints as they were the easiest to use without risking them bleeding into the fabric.

After adding colour to the design, I sewed over the design lines in back stitch with a single strand of embroidery thread. To emphasise the circular frame, I whipped the back stitch to give it a little more weight.

The hardest part came after finishing the stitching. How exactly was I going to turn it into a card… For earlier embroidered cards, I mostly wrapped the fabric around a card panel and stuck it to the front of a card base. This worked, but it wasn’t particularly elegant and it was a bit bulky for posting. For the Plaza cinema card, I set the embroidery behind an aperture, but that was a much bigger card and I had more room to work around the border.

In the end, I tweaked the process I used on that card, scaling it down to work on a 14cm square card. And I have refined it further over time.

I’ve even prepped a blog post explaining the process — partly because it might be useful to someone else and partly so I don’t have to rely on my memory when I haven’t made one for a while! I just have to process the photos to go with it before posting it.