End of year gifts

19 Jul

It’s nearly the end of the summer term here, B has been working hard on little gifts to give to her teachers.  I’d had an idea of her writing their names on a piece of fabric that I could then embroider and it could then be incorporated into an item for them.  Well, the thought then occurred to me that she could possibly do the embroidery herself and that would be a much more personal touch.  So out with hoop, needle and thread and off she went.  I was amazed and impressed she seemed to immediately get the hang of backstitch and off she went.

Funnily enough on the day we started this sewing up popped this post on the Made by Joel blog (a fascinating place with masses of ideas for art and craft with children, go and look – just in time for the holidays), so this also alerted me to the amazing Wendi Gratz who is a bit of an expert at embroidery and on her blog has little video tutorials for lots of different stitches.  They are easy to follow, Bethan was quite inspired.

Once the embroidery was done I grabbed a few pairs of old jeans and cut out some panels of fabric approx 6″x10″.  From my scraps bag Bethan chose some fabrics for each teacher for the ‘windows’ of reverse applique that we were going to add and for a couple of yoyos to sew on each finished item.

So here we have a clever little poppet with the finished gifts:

Each pencil case/purse is slightly different but all have embroidered names and reverse applique with a couple of yoyos/Suffolk Puffs (or whatever else you like to call them) on one side and a piece of reverse applique on the other side too.

Mrs Roberts is leaving this term and Bethan is quite sad about that and wanted to embroider a whole sentence ‘Mrs Roberts I love you and I will miss you’ I managed to persuade her that just the name would be best!

Mrs Brand has named Bethan ‘my little Welsh fairy’ this year and if I’d been a bit more on the ball we could have used some Michael Miller fairy fabric for the lining – hindsight is just great!

Mrs Vile has been a great teacher and might well have Leah in her class in September as she’ll be teaching in reception, I hope Leah can be as well behaved as Bethan appears to have been this year!

I didn’t use a pattern for these, just made it up as I went along, but I have had plenty of practice making purses and clutches so I used my already acquired knowledge.  If you’re interested in a tutorial let me know and I’ll see what I can come up with before the end of the next school year!

We also had a baking session on Sunday afternoon and make a large amount of gingerbread men and women, some of which will be zipped inside the above gifts!

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2 Replies to “End of year gifts

  1. Looks great, excellent embroidery too. I’m curious about the mosaic you have photographed these over. Do you have a picture of it? (I make mosaics ;))

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