I am so excited about this new year. I have so much to be thankful for and I count my family and friends among my many blessings. I am especially grateful to my dear friend for giving me the opportunity to design more for Sizzix. This is going to be a truly amazing year!

I can finally start sharing a few of the designs I’ve been working on. The embroidered design shown above began with two different sets of Sizzix clear stamps.

I designed a set of clear stamps that can be used for birth announcements which includes bunnies and my favorite Hollyhock flowers. I fell in love with Hollyhock flowers after seeing some quaint illustrations in vintage children’s books. I also designed a set of alphabet/number stamps. They are a nice size to use on cards or scrapbooks.

For my embroidered project I used the Hollyhock border and numbers to create the basis for my stitching. I placed the linen fabric “backwards” in the embroidery hoop so that it would lay flat and taunt for the stamping. I used Frayed Burlap Distress Ink to stamp because it was dark enough to see but light enough to blend in with the linen after I was done.

After I stamped the image, I removed the linen from the reversed embroidery hoop and retightened it on the correct side to begin stitching. I started with the yellow at the center of the flowers following the lines of the stamped art. I will list the embroidery thread colors that I used at the end of this post. Next, I stitched the dark pink and then the light pink, varying the stitch direction.

The small leaves on the top are done in a lighter shade of green with the large leaves at the bottom in a darker shade of green. I used a chain stitch to outline the year.

The final step was to remove the linen from the larger, working embroidery hoop and place it in a smaller hoop that would act as a frame.

Here is a suggested list of DMC embroidery floss that I used:

DMC 726 yellow
DMC 3687 dark pink
DMC 3354 light pink
DMC 472 light green
DMC 471 dark green
DMC 959 aqua

I will post more projects using these stamp sets as soon as I can. These sets will be available in early 2016. I can’t wait! This is going to be an exciting year!

Wishing everyone a year filled with happiness. Welcome 2016!

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