The Making of a Bib

Or, rather, not the making of the bib, per se, but the embellishing of it.

Tricks of the Trade

Last week I promised you a Process Blog, and this week I make good on that promise.  As I've mentioned before, I make bibs for people when they have babies.  And since my brother's firstborn is due in less than a month, I figured I'd better get started on the bib for my newest nephew.

It starts, as these things do, with an idea (Yes, I've been planning this since August.  Sometimes I am slow.)  Once I know what illustration I want to use, I freehand it onto the bib using an air-erase marker:

There is a reason for the patch.  A darkly humorous reason.

And then I pick out my colors, and begin to stitch.  In this instance I decided I wanted a gray and cream bunny (the colors of my childhood stuffed animal), with dark blue script (since my brother is Air Force).

Here is an idea of how long the actual stitching takes me:

80 minutes in

160 minutes in

240 minutes in (yes, that's four hours, and not consecutive because I'd go blind.)

Now at this point I knew I wanted a vegetable next to the bunny.  Originally I'd sketched in a carrot (you can just barely make it out in the 80 minutes in shot), but it seemed to me that you don't have to be particularly brave to try a carrot.  A radish, on the other hand...

Notice there is no trace of the carrot I'd drawn the day before.  Air eraseable marker, you are THE AWESOMEST.

The first few times I embroidered something, I made iron-on transfers out of my drawings, but now I find it much easier and faster just to draw directly on the fabric- and since I make a habit of doing my doodles in pen, I'm comfortable working that way, and generally end up with pretty clean lines (see above).

This is how much thread I used to do those two little green leaves.  It is also how much thread it ended up taking me to do the last, large leaf.

All in all, it took me six hours (360 minutes) to finish, which isn't so bad.

The compass star is to guide brave little bunnies home again.

The backside.  Not the messiest I've ever done, but I'm sure I could be cleaner, given more time and practice.

My handsome modeling cat.

It was good to be stitching again- it had been almost a year since the last time I did something, and it's really put me in the mood to do more.  It may be that I do stitched valentines this year... hmmm...