My Christmas Project

Each year I consider for a long time what I can make as a well received gift to my family and friends. I usually struggle hard with this. Well, I noticed  a lot of gift shops over the summer and fall were selling tea towels with screen-printed quotations on them. I don't do screen printing, but I thought perhaps I could embroider on flour sack tea towels that I ordered from Amazon. So I went on-line to find the best of  "funny kitchen quotes", printed it out on printer paper using different fonts that I thought might be easy to trace onto the cotton fabric. This was the result....13 projects

 Today's Menu has two choices  Take it or Leave it  (terrible, terrible photo)

Life is SHORT Lick the BOWL

When I said "I DO" I didn't mean dishes

No longer CACTI Now it's CACTUS 

 My favourite thing to make for dinner, is reservations.

 If you don't like my cooking, lower your standards.

 homemade with love. In other words I licked the spoon and kept using it.

 Make yourself at home. Do the dishes.

 If I have to stir it, it's homemade.

 Kitchen closed due to illness. I'm sick of cooking.

How do I like my eggs? Umm...in a cake.

I made this one for my SIL in Smiths Falls, who is a great seamstress and quilter. I made it so she could hang it up on her craft room wall. Keep your sewing machine close, and your seam ripper closer. 

I missed taking a photo of this one, so I am showing you how I did the process. I printed out the quote the size and font that I wanted, then hunted down a simple embroidery picture or border to attach to the quotation. I put carbon paper down between the fabric and my "patterns" and traced over it. The lettering was done with two strands of black embroidery thread. The pictures and/or borders were done in mostly bright colours using two or three strands depending on the stitch I used. I did these flowers in bright blue lazy daisy stitch, deep yellow french knot centres, and green stem stitch for the  stems and the same green lazy daisy stitch for the leaves. Elsewhere I used chain stitch, running stitch, back stitch, cross stitch, herringbone and woven herringbone; but mostly I used stem stitch, so the work progressed very quickly.

With most of the towels I included a knit dishcloth I also made and some of the boxes contained a little poem that read,
"This Christmas you deserve the best....
....a present unlike all the rest.
I considered a new car or exotic cruise,
but decided on something you could really use.
Finally I found a gift to admire,
I hope you like your new washer and dryer.
Happy Holidays!"

Tomorrow I shall show you some pictures of some of the gag gifts I made. Maybe some of them will inspire you to use some of the ideas in your future gift making and giving.