Day 1

Question: When did you first learn to sew, and who was your teacher? I learned from my mom, when I was around 7 or 8. She made all of our dresses when we were growing up, and I sat by her side picking up the pins and putting them into a pincushion. I loved looking through her sewing box, and playing with all of the tools. How many of the tools and notions below, do you have in your own sewing box?

Create, Sew and, Stitch, and Play, Garland by Christen Brown

This garland is made from two different sizes of heart shapes, cut from a pieced hex cutter quilt, and backed with fast2fuse. Each heart was first hand-quilted with perle cotton, then embellished with vintage and new sewing notions and other ephemera. The hand stitched embellishments include all manner of vintage sewing notions, including seam gauges, pin cushions, knitting knobby, tatting shuttle, bodkins, safety pins, tape measures, scissors, thimbles, crochet hooks, buckles, bobbins, seam rippers and more. The large hearts are trimmed with a zipper half, and the small hearts with rickrack. The ribbon base is embellished with vintage buttons, and rosettes with a vintage bell for the center.

This piece can be found in my new book, Creative Stitching, Mixing the Old with the New, by C&T Publishing.

Happy Stitching~Christen