THURSDAY THREADS - Dish Towels

Thank you for your patience. I'm running on about four hours sleep and I have a full day.

Last fall I talked about wanting to do dish towels for Halloween. I still do and the towels/ embroidery thread are still paired up for that project. But I'm in serious SPRING mode around here. The dish towels I embroidered for a county fair entry twelve-plus years ago are seeing the last of their days so I decided with fresh spring kitchen towels/ dish rags I'd get at least a couple of dish towels up.

The designs I chose are from Stampin' Up! sets - Daisy Delight and You're Inspiring. Since I can only embroidery one towel at a time, I'm going with Daisy Delight this week. I'm also going to use two different forms of transfer. This week is all about the light box and a graphite pencil.

First, I stamped the design as I want it to look on the towel.. well, close enough:

I had a masked image of the daisy (stamped on cardstock then punched out with the Daisy punch) to do the overlay. I stamped the main full daisy, then masked it off while I stamped other daisy's and the leaves to make them appear as if they were in the background. Everything was done in Memento Tuxedo Black ink.

I started by folding my dish towel the way I do to put them in the drawer. This gives me the corner that will display when I hang the towel on the oven door handle:

Next, I took this image to the light box:

I sketched it out with the graphite pencil on a corner of the flour sack towel. I have to tell you, the ones from walmart are not the good towels. These are thread bare. I'll be lucky to get two years out of these. Gives me time to find better quality? Maybe something on the Spring Quilt Shop Hop next month. 

And here's the final product - ready for stitching. I'm thinking I'm going to have to start taking needlework away from the house one day a week to keep it free from pet hair while I'm working.. either that or turn my office into a no-critter zone. But I don't see that happening any time soon.

I decided to do the daisies in pink to give them a pop of color. White would just be to bland against the white background. Now if I were doing these on blue dish towels... hmmmm now I'm thinking.

Next Thursday I'll show the other design - Daffodils and how I plan to stamp them directly to the towel. I think it will work. We shall see!