Category Archives: PlayGroupMamas

Angel Lace Cloud Pillow and Unique Technique

If you wish success in life, make Perseverance your bosom friend, Experience your wise counselor, Caution your elder brother and Hope your Guardian Angel. Joseph Addison

Very appropriate for the Advent season, this heavenly angel pillow could also serve as a guardian angel baby gift or angel of appreciation. I stitched this on 7 linen hemstitched guest towels which hung as banners as a Christmas gift for each of my beloved PlayGroupMamas.

Scraps of lace are stitched on a grid and secured with a feather stitch. Grids in two sizes are free downloads at Brother’s blog, Stitching Sewcial. It may make you re-evaluate the size of scraps too small to save.

A detailed tutorial with step by step photos is posted at Stitching Sewcial.

It was fun to use this same technique on a whimsical version on a dishtowel.

Seeing this photo now, an embroidered gingerbread man would have been more appropriate. Oh well, hindsight and all that.

I hope you are all finished with your Christmas sewing, but I doubt it. We Sisters of the Needle seem to keep on keeping on until the last hour, with more ideas for more gifts for more dear family and friends.

I’d love to hear about your projects and see some photos. So carry on, Sewing Elves! We still have 13 days!

Quick Baby Gift Personalization

Balloons seem to say happy.

I just love being able personalize items for special friends. With two ready to wear onesies, two caps and a white tee for cover up, machine embroidery turned turn plain Jane into special so quickly.

Pooh with balloons is a built in Brother machine design from. The balloons on the shirt and inserted into Johnathan’s name on the cap are from a discontinued Dakota Collectibles Toddler Trio collection, of which I found only one copy available on-line. The designs are tiny, arranged in groups of three and areĀ  wonderful to extract when you need a small design. I often wonder why such collections are discontinued when they could be made available individually by digital download. I’m just glad I have this one in my design library. Continue reading

PGM-PlayGroup Mamas

PGM all

Even though this is a sewing blog, I cannot write about something this close to my heart without including a lot of personal information. In various posts, in order to explain the project or the situation, I have and will continue to mention a group of women who have played an integral part of my life since 1977. We are not, as one new acquaintance assumed, a group who attends plays together.

PGM’s host a baby shower for my daughter-in-law Shelly, the young one in the center back with the long hair

We are a group of women who first gathered one morning in 1977 so that our children could play together. Continue reading