Stitched Paper Gift Bag

 Here's an easy, fun way to turn a plain paper bag into a personalized gift tote.

1. Stamp the entire bag.

2. Spritz the entire bag with glimmer mist to add additional color and sparkle.

3. While that is drying, trim a separate paper sack with decorative scissors; cut to size of front side of gift bag.

4. Stamp paper and spritz paper lightly with glimmer mist, let dry (this should only take a couple minutes).

5. Cut bright fabric scraps into circles for flowers.

6. Enable free motion stitching on sewing machine and attach flowers with varying stitch designs. Then add stems and leaves. I like bright thread and live by the motto "the messier the better."

7. If you want to free motion a word or message I suggest lightly writing it in pencil, then following along with stitching.

8. Have fun, get creative, try anything!

Pin It

Glue Resist - Coloring with Stitch

Yay! As promised, here are the final photos of the glue resist bag (scroll down to see the post from a couple weeks ago). I L-O-V-E free form stitching. It is so freeing to just dive in with no expectations of perfection. Messy, swirly fun!!!

I am addicted to doodle flowers so this was right on. I did find out pretty quickly that in order to stitch on painted fabric I had to lower the tension on my machine by quite a bit. It was down to between 2 and 3 for this. I also learned the hard way that you must REMEMBER to readjust the tension before you start another project!

I love blue flowers, probably because they aren't very common in nature. It made perfect sense to me to make the center of this flower blue. I did stick with traditional green for the stem. I can't wait to do more "drawing" on fabric with stitches! 

Pin It

Scrappy Denim Tea Towels

I needed something blue and white for a raffle basket at my son's school. I ran across these tea towels at Joann's and they were just begging for some embellishment.

I played around with my new fabric markers on an old pair of my husband's jeans. The markers are really fun and I thought the doodle flowers were kinda cute so I kept them for a future project.

Denim flowers meet tea towels. I did a free motion, swirly stitch around the flower borders to attach them. The edges should fray a bit with future washing - wish I could see it but off to the basket they went!

The back side.

I'd love to know what fun ideas you all are up to! Let me know!

Pin It