Catching up with projects: hand embroidered dish towels

I used to have a protocol.

I'd work on a project.  I might or might not have taken in-progress pictures and blogged about them.   If I did take in-progress pictures, I definitely wrote about them on "my" online quilt Delphi forum, Online Quilting Guild.  When the project was finished, pictures would be taken and then posted on Delphi, my blog and Facebook.  At that point, I could consider the project 100% finished and move on to the next project. (There is ALWAYS a 'next' project.)

Well, protocols are good only if you follow them.  I've become increasingly lazy and quite the lamer.  While the Delphi forum does get more or less regular updates, my blog has not; neither has Facebook.  Those of you who maintain a blog know that it takes a considerable amount of time to get an entry ready to post.  That's time I had decided that I would rather be spending on sewing.  :-)   Time marches on and my one remaining brain cell becomes tired and then I discover that I can't remember if I've ever talked about some of the projects that I've finished!

So, that is what I'm going to be doing now .. a series of posts to bring my blog kinda/sorta, more-or-less up to date with where I am in my creative endeavors.

First up is a series of dishtowels I hand-embroidered.  I really do enjoy hand embroidery.  Sometime during the summer of 2015, I bought a set of blank, plaid dishtowels at a quilt show and some poultry themed and some coffee themed designs.  I also bought an incredible (new to me) product called "Sticky Fabri-Solvy".  Solvy makes water-soluble stabilizers.  This stuff is mounted (temporarily) on a stiff piece of paper and can run through your printer.  Once a design is printed on the Solvy, you peel it off the paper much like a Post-It note and stick it onto your embroidery fabric.  You embroider right through the Solvy because, since it's water soluble, once you launder it, it dissolves, leaving only the embroidery behind.

What a FANTASTIC product!  It completely eliminates the tedious part of hand-drawing and transferring the embroidery design onto the foundation fabric!  No more pencil lines that you worry about covering!  The stuff is awesome.

I printed the poultry and coffee designs onto the Solvy, adhered it to the dish towels and happily embroidered the designs.  I made a set for my favorite middle daughter, my favorite niece on my side of the family and a singleton for my favorite youngest daughter.    Yeah, yeah .. cry me a river, Dear Youngest Daughter.  I guess it just wasn't your day to be loved with a set.  :-)

This set was done for my middle daughter.  I took one of them with me on our September trip to Mexico and actually got it finished, which is documented in the little labels I stitched for the towels.




 
The next set was stitched for one of my nieces, who can't seem to function without her morning caffeine.













The last singleton dish towel is for my youngest daughter.  She has a preference for the color red and I found a solid red blank dish towel for her.