Adventures in appliqué

    I got a wonderful birthday present this year from Mike, a brand new sewing machine.  I was using my mom’s old machine from the 70’s, it worked just fine but it weighed about 40 pounds and that is not an exaggeration.  I think Mike eventually got tired of me complaining about carrying that heavy monster from room to room (I sew at the kitchen table and store all of my stuff in the extra bedroom).  Anyways I decided to expand Lilly Pie Creations to include pillow case dresses and appliquéd shirts (I’m hoping to find some cute bloomers to add to my repertoire.)  Please forgive any crooked stitches as I am still learning ::SMILES::

Here are a few pillow case dresses that I made for Lilly.  I am very thankful to have friends with little girls as they make perfect gifts and great practice!

Here are a few of my appliqué projects please pardon the “shaky” stitching on the letters.  It is tough work figuring out how to feed the appliqué in the machine just right without creating a big hole!

Ok yes this was supposed to be Lilly’s monogram but I did the letters out of order D’OH

This “S” was pretty challenging, but it was a lot of fun trying to figure out how to turn and make curves. 

I love the tie…lots of straight lines!

 

A little photography and photo editing

I recently started using photo editing software to make and edit things.  I use G.I.M.P, it is free software and very similar to Photoshop.  Here are a few things that I have messed with..

 

This is the design my MIL and I came up with for our shirts for the Race for the Cure.

 

Lilly’s Santa picture needed to be in a snow globe.

 

I don’t own a fancy DSLR camera with a wide aperture lens, so I have to fudge the out of focus back ground by editing it.

 

My pumpkin baby

 

She’s a tiger fan through and through

I decided to make just about everything for Lilly’s birthday party to cut down on costs, but I didn’t want to hand write the invitations fearing that my handwriting would lead people to the wrong house on the wrong day.  So I made Lilly’s invitation and thank you notes too.   It was actually a lot of fun!

Here is one of the thank you notes I made, they were a lot of fun to make.  If Lilly could play with it our wear it, I took a picture of her with the present and then created personalized thank you notes.  Ok so that sounds much harder than it really was.

Here are a few pictures from my point and shoot of my flowers in my flower beds.  I played around with the close up or “macro” setting.