T.S.N.E.M. February – Shhh…

While I was living overseas, my sister sent me a mug. I used this mug daily. It travelled to work with me (it’s not a travel mug). It has by now seen better days. The handle is long gone and I have to be careful of the side I use. I refuse to toss it.

It still gets occasional use and was the inspiration behind this month’s project. The TSNEM project for the month was a tactile craft such as candle or soap making. Or to make something with clay. None of the ideas I found sparked an interest.

I have however been testing out some mixed media art projects, so I decided to complete an idea for this month’s project.

I must confess to trying to combine 2 challenges into one with this project. Adventures in Making announced their DIY Craft Challenge is back this year and I want to participate. My goal is to complete 2 separate projects, but that just didn’t happen this month.

Since the DIY challenge was Stitches & Threads, I decided to try out paper embroidery. Which is essentially stitching on paper.

I started by wrapping chipboard with fabric leftover from a dress I made. I used tacky glue. The size of my piece is 6 inches by 6 inches.

    

Since we are talking about reading here, I used my Silhouette to cut out a silhouette of a stack of books. I don’t recall where I found the silhouette of books. the file was on my computer. Probably from another unfinished project idea. My original thought was to use dark brown vinyl, but came across scraps of the pleather we used for my Halloween costume and decided it would replicate an old book feel a little better. The Silhouette didn’t cut all the way through the thicker fabric, but it scored it deep enough for me to then quickly trim out the design.

For the paper stitching, I used a design from Flamingo Toes. She has a Shhhh… I’m reading pattern available. My plan was to use the Silhouette to cut a book page into a decorative shape. I quickly discovered that old book pages are not quite sturdy enough.  I traced a rough shape and then hand cut the paper.

For the stitching, I traced the lettering onto the page. Then using a pin, I pricked holes along the tracing. I’m going to need a little practice getting the holes the same distance apart. Since this paper was fairly thin, I was very careful while stitching not to pull the thread too roughly so I didn’t pull out stitches. I did pull a few from when I places the holes too close together. I was able to just make the stitch longer to fix the stitch.

      

For finishing touches, I added a couple buttons to the corners of the paper. I had planned to stitch around the edge of the page, but I kept pulling out the stitches. I trimmed off the little bit I had stitched and left it as is.

To complete the project, I plan on matting and framing it to hang somewhere in my house.