Sheepies in Love Pattern

For Valentine's Day at the shop this year I designed a free embroidery pattern of two sheep in love for our customers. Valentine's has come and gone and since this weekend is the Kentucky Sheep and Fiber Fest, I thought I would offer it up here. The sheep love pattern can be downloaded here.

Also, if this is your first embroidery project or your first hard copy transfer, I highly recommend Jenny Hart's tutorials, they are how I learned. For this project I used the tracing paper and transfer pen technique, but if you don't have a transfer pen or carbon transfer paper, you can get away with tracing it lightly onto your fabric with a thin graphite pencil. Have fun!!

Day 2- My Left Lung

I am working on a series of embroidered anatomical drawings on felt. This is actually the second one I have completed, but due to my lack of measuring the heart did not fit the frame and must be redone. The lungs are not anatomically correct (notice the lack of a bronchial tubes,) but they will loosely mirror each other and sit on the wall as a triangular triptych with the new heart- all in gold leaf frames.

Ribz

This weekend was pretty low-key. Friday night we just sat out on the porch drinking wine and enjoying the beautiful weather with a few friends. Saturday our neighbors had a yard sale where I scored a kitchen scale and a griddle, two things that I really wanted. I put the griddle to use immediately by whipping up a batch of barbequed seitan ribz from the Fat Free Vegan blog. You might remember we made these last summer on the grill, but we had a little trouble with the high heat of the grill and the ribz sticking. We cooked the second batch on the stovetop and those came out perfectly carmelized and there was no sticking, but they didn't have the nice grill marks that make them feel like ribs. Saturday, we made our first batch of ribz on the griddle and they were nothing short of awesome (so great we made batch #2 on Sunday.) We also threw some leftover corn on the grill, made a side of bbq mashed potatoes and served it all with two large glasses of iced tea. How's that for the perfect summer meal?

In craftier news, Philip and I did a collaborate embroidery project as a birthday gift. He did the illustration and I embroidered it on the lower right corner of an American Apparel t-shirt. We were really happy with the final result and I learned a lot about using transfer paper on knitted fabric (always transfer from a thin paper stock and always put something hard under the top layer of fabric.) Anyway, here is how the final version came out.