Fuck Off Bunting.

I am sure you have all had that moment when you sit at work and think to yourself “Why am I doing this?”. The brain can then wander off in all directions, searching for the dream vocations that would cease the musings and be wall to wall terrific.

My daydreams take me to those presenters on the Craft shopping channels, who show you all the new quilting gadgets and have those slightly bizarre but magical hand motions to illustrate all the capabilities with flawless clarity.
I could do that. I could be the face of crimping scissors and ribbon curlers and I would get a discount on the craft goodies …but then I would also have to be making ‘Get well soon’ cards at a cold TV studio at 2am, using a piece of plastic toot that is trying to reinvent the pritt stick- even the best jobs have grimy bits.

So for now I will keep my current job and stick to making the greetings cards at home on Saturday afternoon, just like all Rock and Rollers do.

Embroidery is great because you can pick up the hoop and take it on the train, tube or in front of the telly and crack on in increments of 10 minutes or 10 hours. I find the small motions of embroidery therapeutic and it often helps me focus my thoughts, meaning I pause often to scribble down ideas and then pick up where I left off.

When I needed a card for some friends, I thought I could combine my dreams of craft stardom and embroidery notoriety into one rollicking greetings card.

I started with a image from the web and cut this out with a scalpel- you could use this technique on any picture, I just thought the dog would appeal to my imaginary Craft Channel viewers.
I then stuck the cut out to a card blank with Pritt stick, if you don’t have a stash of card blanks in house like I do, you can get these from any good stationers, or they probably do a blinding bulk deal on the Craft Channel.

Then I decided which of the details from the picture I wanted to pick out- I chose to keep the pooch as is and decorate all of the dog house with embroidery. Because this was going to be a greetings card, I anchored my thread with tape, instead of knotting it, to help the card remain flat.

I then built up the stitching detail in stages of different colours. I found it easier to pre-puncture my stitching holes with a needle from the front, as getting through the card can be quite tough. I used back stitch for all of this design in a mix of neon cotton and sparkly polyester threads. This will blunt your needle, so be prepared to jettison it at the end.

Once I had completed the embroidery for the front of the card, I needed to add an inner to the card, to cover the messy guts of the embroidery.

I did this by adding a sheet of craft paper (a sneaky freebie from Mollie Makes, that matched my colour way perfectly) as an inner and anchoring at the spine of the card with some more thread.

I added a centered square of white paper onto the patterned paper write the message on. To make sure the inner didn’t flap around too much, I stuck the corners down with a dab of glue.

And here’s the final card, for a couple of pups in their new dog house.