Flower Pillow for Mom

I made this pillow awhile ago for my mom and decided to share it.

It's a round pillow embroidered with a flower. Each petal represents one of my mom's kids (five kids = five petals) with miltiple hearts in the center. Around the edge is embroideered the phrase "The Power of a  Mother's Love is like an ever-blooming flower."

Cross Stitched Feminism Pillow

We can find power and celebration in many things. We can turn old fashioned skills and arts into an expression of something else. I find some sort of strange comfort from turning something that used to symbolize much of a woman's bonds into something that can symbolize what we are capable. A woman doesn't have to reject the arts of her grandmothers to embrace the ideals of equality and feminine power.

For this project, I used the female symbol, cross stitched in black and red to embrace the ideals of feminism and equality.

I started with a template made on graph pattern for the pattern. The lettering and phrases around the edges were mostly just to get a template for the letters not for the final placement.

Using black and red embroidery thread, I cross stitched my female design with phrases around the edges that emulated the theme. "Never let the hand you hold, hold you down." "History and Herstory." "If your not outraged your not paying attention." "A woman's life is a human life." "I am not your Barbie Doll." "The meek are ready." "Proud to be a feminist." "equality.""I resist." And so on. I then embellished the sides.

When the needlework was completed I cut a square of a red velvet-like material (seen in a few other projects) for the backing. Instead of sewing them right sides together, I opted to sew them wrong sides together.

Wrong sides together, I pinned the edges securely, especially taking into account the stretchy nature of the red backing fabric. Then, using a strong backs titch hand-sewed the two sides together with black embroidery thread, using the stitches along a clear straight line as part of the overall design, but making sure to leave a small gap to stuff.

Using the opening I left, I carefully stuffed the pillow to the desire fluffiness with some poly-fil I had on hand, being careful not to rip open the stitches around the opening.

Once full, I pinned the opening (once again being mindful of the stretchy nature of the red fabric for the backing), and sewing it securely shut with black embroidery thread and the back stitch. I pulled the loose thread from the fabrics to give a fringed edge to the small square pillow.

A pillow to make any feminist proud. (Take ye inspiration where ye may.)

"Sweet Dreams" Pillow Cases

This is a set of embroidered pillow cases I made for me. Growing up, I saw embroidered pillowcases a lot more, but over the years I have seen less and less. (Probably the result of fewer people knowing how to needlepoint.)

I used pre-printed pillow cases I found at a local craft store and embroidered the flowery "Sweet Dreams" across the ends of both pillow cases. I entered one in our local county fair & took first place.

(We're never old for ribbons.) I even had a friend who called to tell me she saw them and to comment on how pretty they were.

There are certain "old fashioned" things that never seem to really go out of style & some of those things that are nice additions to personalize your world.

The Ladies Who Craft

Turkey Hat Wall Hanging

Part of the time I volunteer my time at a nursing home doing various crafts with my aunt and a couple of older women. It started as a result of a friend of the family feeling the activities offered at her facility lacked in projects that she would enjoy. They are based around getting as many people involved as possible and often offer rather simplistic projects. In a smaller group we could give more individual attention and chose projects that were a bit more in depth, even those that took more than one day or one hour.

There have been a few goals in this endeavor:

Making Turkey Hat Wall Hangings

     (1) To take on projects that are too much for large groups with many needing special attention.
     (2) To make things that would be usable or decorative for their living space.
     (3) To keep their limited space in mind... decorative and storage needs.
     (4) To have fun.  

We have taken on many different crafts that include some of the things I have pictured here as well as card making, various painting and decoupage projects.

Making Fleece No Sew Pillows

Before Thanksgiving we took straw hats, felt, and rafia to make turkey wall hangers to be used to decorate walls or doors. (I even made one for my mom. She really gets into decorating for the holidays and didn't have have anything for the front door for Thanksgiving.)

We also made no-sew knotted fleece pillows for Thanksgiving so that they had one for their own room and one to give away to someone they were thankful to or for.

Clay Pot Scarecrows

Another fall project was scarecrows made from clay pots. The scarecrows took a couple days of of painting and decorating with straw, felt, buttons, straw hats, and little black crows, but turned out adorable.A nice center piece for rooms.