DIY Embroidered Christmas Tree Skirt

A couple years ago, I saw a picture of a tree skirt that had painted hand prints in a bunch of different colors. I thought it'd be kind of cool in black and white, but then I thought about embroidering the handprints instead. I always get so busy with DIY stuff in December, so I waited to work on this in January. I had some plain white fabric that I dyed with avocado pits to make the pale pink. I kind of winged it on the sewing portion of this. It's not perfect, but it does the job.

I traced the girls handprints on paper and played around with placement before drawing the outline.  Each handprint took me about 30-45 minutes to embroider and it was so easy to work on here and there while watching tv or downtime throughout the day. 

I finished embroidering towards the end of January and put it away in storage. It was such a joy to unpack and put the skirt out this year. I love picturing how the handprints will multiply through the years and will bring a smile to my face every time I pull it out.

Learning New Skills : Embroidery

My aunt makes the cutest embroidered hand towels (you can see her Santa one in my holiday post) and this has been a craft I've been wanting to learn lately, so I asked her to teach me. She taught me to cross stitch when I was little, so I remember a bit from that. We picked up some supplies and she showed me some of the basic stitches to get me started. My aunt chuckled at the retro themed patterns I picked out (this includes a cassette tape, roller skates, and much more), but I knew this radio would be perfect for Ben. After a bit of practicing the basic stitches, I got to work.

This piece probably could have been done at this point, but I also really love embroidery art that is completely filled in so I kept going. I started to fill some of the smaller pieces. I liked how it was progressing so I just went ahead and filled in everything I could.

Once I could see the end in sight, I hunkered down and finished up the piece while the girls were watching a movie (probably Incredibles 2 again). I'm still working on finding the right framing solution for this, but it is fun to have the piece finished.

I'm going to take a little break before my next piece, but I love perusing through #modernembroidery to see some other fun projects. Also, check out one of my favorite embroidery artists Danielle Clough on Instagram