Have you ever seen a towel with the design so high up that you can only see half the design when hung on an oven handle? Or looked at a T shirt with the design sitting on someone’s belly button? Well, there is a formula for proper placement of designs on everything.
If you are putting a design on a kitchen tea/dish towel the rule of thumb is the bottom of the design should be 3″ from the bottom of towel if there is no built in border. If there is a border then bottom of design should be about 1″ from top of border. That means you need to know how tall your design is so you can find center placement because designs are all embroidered with 
marking from the center point. That 3 inch also gives you room to add a pretty fabric band, or ruffle or ribbon trim along the bottom. If you have software then print out a template, cut around the designs and place on towel so you can measure up 3 inches to bottom of design. Then do placement markings with an erase away marker. Continue reading “Embroidery Placement Woes”
I’ve talked a lot about quilting and embroidery on quilting, but I want to take a break and talk about embroidery old and new. Embroidery today is a far cry from what it used to be. In the “olden days” embroidery was done by hand. It was and still is beautiful but took a lot of patience and was time consuming. . If it was machine embroidered on clothing or linens, it was done on a commercial machine and was expensive to buy. You were also limited by whatever designs they sewed on the item. 
One of my favorite things to do is embroidery. I love the way a quilt looks with embroidery on it. There are several ways to do this. One, you can make enough embroidered blocks to start piecing the blocks like any quilt with sashing in between. You put your narrow borders on and you add a wide border all around. This wide border can have embroidery on it as well, 
giving a beautiful finished look. That’s what I did with my personal bed quilt. I used the Judy Nowecki embroidery design disk, Floral Elegance. I loved this quilt when it was finished and I still do now. 
Quilts have been around for a long time but they started out as a necessity. They were made of old clothing, ragged blankets, or whatever fabric the pioneers could find. I guess you could call it, early recycling. If they were wealthy enough or lucky enough to get hold of some nice fabric then those quilts turned into beautiful artistic treasures that were handed down through the generations. All the piecing and quilting was done by hand and could take years to make depending on the designs. These quilts were made of many different blocks or one or two of the same blocks
. I’m going to talk about a passion I have had since I was about 6 years old. It’s sewing!
Sewing Scoupe 