May 2, 2008

Mother's Day #2

My mom just got her present in the mail today, so I can post it!

Pillow for mother's day

A lumbar-support pillow for my mom, complete with an embroidered doodle of our family. Here is a closeup:

Pillow for mother's day (detail)

I made both the pillowcase and the actual pillow. The pillowcase has a simple envelope back for taking off and cleaning, and is made from some brown linen pants, a piece of dark blue fabric left over from my quilt, and Freecycled blue shiny fabric (looks like satin, but clearly polyester) and off-white muslin. I did the embroidery with three-thread embroidery floss (basically, splitting the ones you buy in half) for greater clarity on the small details. There must be a better way to do it than what I did, but I basically sketched a doodle, scanned it into Photoshop, sized it appropriately, printed it out, pinned the printout to the fabric, and embroidered through both the muslin and the paper. Because of all the needle holes, the paper ends up perforated enough to just tear away. I thought of doing it on freezer paper and ironing that onto the muslin, but you can't print on freezer paper, so that would have involved several extra steps on the other end. Hmmm... How do you guys transfer digital images for embroidering?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

And as the lucky recipient of the pillow, I can attest that this is the best lumber support pillow ever... and, of course, the most precious... I love Lara's little embroidered legs :)

Anonymous said...

Cute cute! I love the embroidered hair.

I'm pretty sure you can buy iron-on transfer paper for inkjet printers. You'd have to flip anything that you didn't want to come out mirrored.

Kristin said...

Dressmaker's carbon and a stylus. It doesn't work on all fabrics, though -- and it can rub off with time. :(

Loved said...

I have used tracing paper - if you trace with a pencil and turn the paper over then go over your lines again, it will mark your fabric. If you don't want the mirror image, follow the above process on a piece of paper first and then onto your fabric.
I made a T-shirt for my mother-in-law with one of my daughter's drawings like this, then embroidered the T-shirt with coloured thread. It came out beautifully!!