Swapping Gifts

This Labor Day we celebrated the 1 month birthday of my daughter, Viviana. Here she is surrounded with a bunting I made her using Anna Maria Horner flannels. She's growing so fast and is already not fitting some of her newborn clothes!

I've been interested in doing more hand stitching lately since I have less time to spend sewing at my machine. I love that I can put my project in my diaper bag and work on it at any time I have a spare minute. The last couple of swaps got my interest in hand embroidery started.

 

For the #talknt swap on Twitter, I made a pin cushion for @OwlyJulie using her favorite colors lime and teal. I fussy cut an owl on the front and put her first initial "J" on the back.  

I decided to try embroidering because I happened to have a skein of embroidery floss to match, but since I had never done that before, I got a tutorial from my Aunt and borrowed her embroidery hoop and needle to do it! I also made Julie a pouch in her other favorite color combo, aqua and red, and filled it with embroidery extras for her own projects.

 

Last week at our Orange County Modern Quilt Guild monthly meeting, we started a new birthday swap amongst our members. When it's your birthday, the person in the guild who had their birthday last will make a gift for you!Since my birthday passed most recently, it was my turn to make a gift for the next birthday girl.
 

 For Darly, I decided to make another pin cushion which I embroidered with her name. You can see I'm getting a little better with my back stitch here compared to the first one!

I added a couple of other goodies for her birthday gift.

Tonight at the Los Angeles Modern Quilt Guild meeting we are having our anniversary swap again to celebrate the 3rd anniversary of the guild. Last year I participated in this and really enjoyed it. It's a blind swap in which we exchange scrap bags and make our partner something from our scraps adding only 1 fabric. Rather than choose from my scraps randomly, I selected one focus fabric and then choose others to coordinate with the fall inspired palette. I can't wait to see what my partner surprises me with!