My mom ruined one of her favourite shirts. She was with her mom who was painting. My mom got some chemical on her shirt that starting eating the fabric right away, leaving a weird spot right on the front. She showed it to me and I said, "thank you very much for my next project" and took it away.
The biggest problem was that I don't trust myself with design work. So I had to wait until Danielle had enough time and energy to draw out a pattern for me that we could agree on and help me pick out colours. She told me we should not do just flowers, but we should do little birdies instead.
(spoiler so the thumbnail picture will match the title: We did a better stitch for the birdies and it worked out so great! here it is mid-progress)
I was nervous because when I made Jacob's Stormfather shirt it took me A MILLION HOURS to do the filling in... let me 'splain.... no, no, it is too long. Let me sum up. In pictures.
This was at the beginning when I was enthusiastic and thought the letters were going to be the hardest parts. This was the easy stuff.
This was about when I ran out of grey thread. I thought those skeins ran on forever until this point. I was still a novice in some of the ways of embroidery. I realize the quality of lighting makes this look like a completely different shirt. It's not. I promise. I would not do this exactly the same two times.
Here's the final image! It took maybe two more skeins of that embroidery thread. It was a valentine's gift for him and I was trying very hard to finish it by the 14th of February but it was hard to do that while it was supposed to also be a suprize. So, on Valentine's I showed him the unfinished project so I could continue working on it while I was sitting next to him at night when the kids were asleep.
SO. I was not looking forward to so many uneven stitches on little birdies for this purple shirt. However. The idea came to us from an embroidery book that showed a chain stitch which we thought might be quite adorable for these birds. And, in fact, it was perfect.
So here's the shirt in it's completed state. It's actually my mom's top favourite shirt now. The one most likely to be the one she's wearing when I happen to stop by her house at random.
The problem is that this fat little blue bird was the one I did first and I didn't feel like I knew what I was doing so it ended up being fatter with slightly more chaotic rows than the pink one and I just have a huge preference for it.
Now notice the pink one has practically perfect rows of chain stitch? Technically a better bird and a better job on the embroidery, I think. However, not the same life and chutzpah. If I did it again I would be a little less careful and I think I might like it as much as the other one.
However, the pink one is still cute. I still like it. I just... picked favourites.
I just love that I was able to revive this shirt for her with the skill that I learned in order to complete the project she started almost 40 years ago, which is another blog post in and of itself.
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