A Sham for Sharon

I finished a project last week that I've been working on for a while.  My friend Sharon asked if I would make a pillow sham for her.  She's an occupational therapist and has taken on a new kind of job traveling all over the country for temporary assignments in hospitals.  She's been in the south, Washington D.C. area, and New York among other places.  It's the perfect thing for her at this time.  What an adventure - seeing the sights and making friends all over the country! 

Sharon asked me to make a sham so she could have a piece of home with her no matter where she finds herself.  She gave me carte blanche, which can be a dangerous thing... if you're like me.  When pressed, she said she liked birds and thought perhaps a two sided sham could be seasonal.  

Birds?  Seasons?  Complete creative freedom?  I said yes.

I am obsessed with homey Granny Chic these days 

and my 70s fabrics were calling my name.

Add a few doilies, embroideries, birds...

plenty of ingredients for a two-sided pillow sham.

I wanted a patchwork and needed to lay it out

on the computer to get the right balance.

(I'm visual on top of visual.)

Any good Granny Chic piece is going to have embroidered words.

Finding the perfect poem by Victor Hugo for Sharon and her current situation, 

I stitched it onto a piece of vintage linen.

"Be like the bird in flight... pausing a while on boughs too slight,

feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings,

knowing that she had wings."

I moved and moved the lace, the bird, the swatches,

the doilies, the embroidery around for the longest time

until I was satisfied with the layouts for both sides.

I had to pack it up for Christmas, so this is when the computer layout

became the key with stapled corners of the fabrics.

Yes, I am sloooow at these things, but the sham is now finally finished.

It is lined in cotton and opens on either end with 16 matching

mother-of-pearl buttons I was lucky enough to find in my collection.

After considering big mismatched 70s buttons of blues and yellows,

I decided to let the shell buttons calm down the overall design instead.

The warm side.  Summer and fall?

A beautiful old piece of embroidery.

A bird applique cut from a vintage tablecloth. 

It was fun to create this sham.

I hope you like it, Sharon.

And I hope you enjoy pausing

on your latest 'slight bough'

in Rapid City, South Dakota.

See you the next time you wing your way home!

Let's Brooch The Subject

The creative bug has really bitten me lately.  I can't seem to even think of giving a gift if it's not handmade right now.  I know, kind of hard to find enough time - especially with school board elections in a couple of weeks.  It's becoming a heated race for two seats on the board - one left vacant by yours truly.  Yes, let's broach the subject.  I did follow through on the statement that I was not running for reelection after serving on my suburban school board for almost 13 years and as president for seven.  Now I'm down to only a few weeks left 'til my last board meeting.  I feel a new dawn coming with freedom on the horizon.

Perhaps I'll blog more about that later, but for now I want to tell you about a little gift I made for a friend's birthday.  A few weeks ago, at our Valentine's day church activity with the 12 and 13-year-old girls we stitched little felt heart-shaped brooches or pins.  Since then, I guess I had an unfulfilled desire to actually give one a serious effort.  Here we go.

The buttons I chose were in a certain color palate.  I don't know why, I just love these colors together.  In the picture, I was picking through my teeny, tiny mother of pearl buttons to choose some for the centers of other buttons.  I'm not very good at dating buttons exactly, but I know all of these are pre-50s with the exception of the blue one - which I didn't end up using.  I really love the tiny yellow button on the white daisy.  To give you an idea of size, that whole daisy is only about 5/8ths inch wide.

Next I laid out the buttons on a vintage piece of cream colored felt, wanting the shamrock to be prominent.  This pin is all about the pink shamrock because it's for a daily-brooch-wearing friend named Erin who was born into a very Irish family the day after St. Patty's day.  And because of that, every year she gets tons of green and themed gifts.  I thought it might be nice for her to receive something that wasn't green for a change.   Yet the vintage pink four-leaf clover is still a nod to her love of all things Irish.

After a quick check on the net for a diagram on how to embroider leaves - I did a few lazy daisy stitches on a stem.  Add a couple of French knots, fasten the buttons on, stuff it with three cotton balls, and finish it off with a simple blanket stitch using... you guessed it, vintage embroidery floss, add a pin back and voilá, it's a brooch!  

Happy birthday, Erin.  

I hope you have something to wear this with!