What? a new embroidery freebie?!

Check it out! I got all inspired to work on my website and well, my business (sorry business, I’ve been busy and not paying you the attention you deserve!) and well, I made a new freebie! It’s been FAR to long.

So enjoy the Keep Portland Weird freebie. Yes, it is very much inspired by the bumper stickers, I have one on my own car. I want one of the ” keep portland beered” stickers too, but Jonah says its his turn to put some stickers on the car. Sigh, sharing.

I think I’m going to put this on an old T-shirt to give it some new life. There are three sizes for your embroidery pleasure. Make something!

Maggie

June Freebie!

A camper trailer design in honor of my new studio/camper! I am going to make these into curtains, i think they’d be pretty cute lining the bottom of curtains in my studio. They’d also be cute on some camping pillows! To download click here. Have fun!

Maggie

April Tigerpup Embroidery Freebie!

I’ll be posting a big post about this later next week, but look whats joining my embroidery patterns: greeting cards you can embroider! Fun, fast, and cute as the dickens, you will have a blast embroidering these, and your friend will be amazed, and possible keep the card forever.

This freebie is a nice little kitty. The PDF file has two complete cards on it, so just print it out (make sure your printer is on landscape, not portrait setting) on cardstock and stitch it! I’ll be posting a tutorial soon on how to embroider paper, but if you can’t wait for it, you can find them out there on the internet.

Have fun! Maggie

March Embroidery Freebie!

This month’s embroidery freebie is a slightly altered version of the Quetzal pattern I designed for my friend Laurie. To download it just click on the image above! She commissioned it for an upcoming trip to Costa Rica. Four lucky women are traveling to Costa Rica, and every night they will sleep on pillowcases embroidered with the Resplendent Quetzal. Isn’t it a beautiful bird?
To get the color change qualities of the Quetzal, Laurie came up with a novel idea: mixing different strands of embroidery floss together to make a new, two (or three) colored strand to embroidery with! Now, this may not seem like a new idea to some of you, but it blew my mind! I love it, I want to do it all the time now! For the birds head feathers, we mixed two strands of lime with one of turquoise, and for the wing feathers two bright blues. So much fun, the bird seems to shimmer on the pillowcase.

And giving Laurie a refresher course on embroidery was fun too. She’ll be a pro by the time she finishes her third pillowcase!

Maggie

Free Embroidery Patterns!

As part of Tigerpup Embroidery, I thought it would be fun to have free monthly embroidery patterns that you can download and print yourselves! My plan is for them to be something you could use along with the more elaborate pattern sets, but who knows? I could get crazy sometime. For starters though, we’ve got banners and hearts.

The banners will be great for embroidering names, dates, words, or sayings into. And since they are PDF files, if you want to you can resize them easily to fit your needs! Click on the picture to download.

The hearts are for Valentines, obviously, but they can work anytime! I think I may have incorportated a few of them into my “I love chickens” set. I’m looking forward to doing the little birdies myself. And if you feel you need to practice your french knots, do the “be mine.” You’ll be a pro by the end! Click on the picture to download.Enjoy!

Maggie

Halloween Felt Cat Ornament!

I know, a day late, but hey, 364 days EARLY for next Halloween! Its never to early to start on next years decorations… I designed this little guy a few weeks ago, and finished my prototype a couple weeks ago. Which means that I meant to put this on the blog like 10 days ago! In the next week or so I plan on scanning the images and writing directions and posting it for free download on the blog. If I don’t remind me! He’s really fun to make!

Here’s the start, the drawing. I then traced the various parts on to tracing paper and loosely cut them out to pin onto wool felt.

The circle the head sits on is the size of a cd. That should give you some sense of scale. I cut it out with pinking sheers for the fun of it, you don’t need to! After seeing how it looked all placed together, i pinned on the mouth first, and blanket stitched around it, then stitched on the teeth lines. After that I put on the eyes, also with blanket stitch. the iris’ and the nose are all buttons. The head and whiskers are all sewn down with silver thread for fun, just one piece of embroidery thread was used, rather than all six. The details are pretty small, so you don’t want to muck it up with to much floss!

A view of my studio table with it all out.

And the finished cat! I free handed the boo stitched on top, luckily it turned out! The orange felt is stitched down on black felt on the back, with tree tinsel stitched in between the layers. I was going to stuff it a little bit, but I forgot! Next time I will, I think it would be neat.
And the leaf ribbon is pretty fun too. You can get that at Collage!
I promise, I will put up a PDF of the design, I’d love it if you tried it and let me know how it turns out! And if my directions are clear. I want to design more of this type of stuff. I’m also working on some very cute Embroidery designs. More on that later!

Maggie