As discussed in my recent blog post, I spent time in May and June recovering from school and catching up on household tasks that had long fallen by the wayside. In addition to batch cooking and starting a summer course, I took up some maker projects again. I have found that my learning curve with university left very little time for doing other things I love doing. The only maker project I could work on while studying full-time was sock-knitting (more on that in a future post), because I could pull that out on bus rides to and from school or sometimes during school lectures (knitting helped me stay focused if my attention was starting to wander, and I could quickly set the needles and yarn down in order to write lecture notes).
However, a then-upcoming wedding in June prompted me to get back into maker-mind for the production of wedding gifts! Something I have noticed is that if I have not done maker projects in awhile, it takes a bit of effort to get back into the materials and mindset. But having a focus really helped. I always like to make practical gifts for weddings and showers, so I decided on an embroidered linen dish towel and dishcloths. I had a peek at the bride’s online gift registry and saw that she liked aqua and teal colours in the kitchen, so that set the theme for me. I picked a mosaic knit stitch that I like doing, selected a light blue cotton yarn as the base colour, and added the second relevent colours to each dish cloth. I made each cloth smaller than I have before, because I find I don’t like handling bigger cloths while washing dishes.
In the above photo, you can also see part of the linen dish towel. I fashioned it from a linen tablecloth I had on hand, which had the aqua colours from the wedding registry. Looking at the photo below, you can see a closeup of the embroidery stitching I did around the edges. I so love doing decorative hand-stitching, whether it’s yarn for crochet and knitting, floss for embroidery, or beads for extra sparkle!
In this next photo, you can see the mitred corner I did for the edges of the dish towel. I just love how sturdy and finished a wide hem and mitred corner look! I first learned how to do this when I made a set of napkins from vintage sheet fabric. And of course, linen fabric is instantly absorbent, so it is wonderful for kitchen towels and bath towels.
Here is an closeup look at the mosaic stitch I used for the dish cloths. This emerald green and light blue was my favourite combination of the four cloths.
And here they all are, rolled up prettily and set on the folded linen dish towel. I had to put them plus wrapping paper into a ziploc bag and squish the air out of the bag so I could fit it into my personal item bag I was taking on the plane. I couldn’t wrap the gifts until I arrived at my destination, in case I was required to declare gifts. It all worked out well, and I was able to get adhesive tape at my destination.
Needing to do this entire project motivated me forward to putting my mind into other creative projects that I had put on hold for nearly a year. Now my table is a happy and colourful spread of these projects finally in process, and I will write more about those soon!
What are you working on creatively? Let’s talk in the comments!