Yesterday was the second time ever I’ve sewn anything by hand (the first being the class in which we learned the basics). As a result, I chose the beginner-level stuffed heart design. I felt the base heart design might’ve been too simple, so I also decided before beginning to sew that I would add some sort of design onto the front of the heart.
I began by folding a sheet of paper in half and drawing half of a heart, with a max width of ~3 inches and a height of ~5 inches.
paper half-heart
I cut this heart out, giving me a full heart shape, and overlaid this shape onto a cut-out rectangle of fabric (not sure exactly what type it is, I assume it’s a cotton sheet?)
difficult to cut 🙁
marginally easier to cut
finished cut
I’d never embroidered a design before, so I decided to go for a relatively complex shape for the most practice: a cartoon bird head. I used chalk to outline the design, and googled how to make a backstitch for the design itself. There were two obstacles to this: one was that the chalk kept rubbing off, so I’d have to re-outline the design to figure out where to make the next stitch. The other was the stitch itself tensioning the fabric too much, causing somewhat unwanted folds. I was initially unsure how to make the eye until I came across the “french knot” on google, which, thankfully, was relatively simple. Despite this, my execution of it left the knot a bit too extruded 😐
bird idea
finished result
Overall this was a fun little first project, perfect or not. I definitely felt myself improving in terms of technique and understanding the mechanics of the knots and stitches.
In terms of cost,
- Paper ~ $0.01
- Fabric (assuming around $10 per square foot, and 30 square inches being used) ~ $2.08
- Embroidery Floss (assuming around $ 0.01/ft and around 7.5 ft used) ~ $0.08
- Cotton balls (assuming 400 for $3.78 and 10 used) ~ $0.09
- Fabric Pins (assuming 600 pc for $4.99 and 3 used) ~ $0.02
- Fabric Scissors/Shears ~ $9
- Fabric Chalk Pencil, Pencil, Pen ~ $4
- Labor (3 hours at $10/hr) – $30
Sum total: $45.28 ($32.26 not counting reusable tools). Talk about overpriced 😵. The thirty dollars of labor had some love poured into it I suppose.
Lastly, I took very great care to ensure my workspace (the 210 table) was clean and tidy, especially being the last one to leave the OEDK. Here are some angles of the finished workspace. Sorry I didn’t get a before picture, but I hope you can trust me in saying it is at least as clean as it was before I started working. I’ll definitely remember to do so next time.
