My Love of Miniature - Simply Sweet

I'm still determining what it is about tiny things, but I've been drawn to them since I was a little girl. Dollhouses are like magical little worlds. Before they realized it was a choking hazard to add a small object with the Cracker Jacks, those prizes were my favorite treasures. 

The best part about collecting miniatures is that they only take up a little room!  

When I started designing my new book, Simply Sweet, I wanted to create little embroidery designs that made me smile. Just random little doodles that made me happy and would make others happy too. 

I found the easiest way to design these was to trace 3" circles onto my fabric and start stitching! Sometimes I made some rudimentary lines using a Frixion pen as a guide, but I tried to let it be more free-flowing than when I designed a larger project. I wanted to make them round because they reminded me of the badges I collected as a Girl Scout. I LOVED earning those badges!  

This book has 64 images. How did I come up with that number? It was because 8 designs fit nicely on a page, and I had 8 pages to work with. I also made sure to have a blank page on the back of each design page for easy tracing. You have to be creative when you know you have 24 pages to work with, including the cover!

SIMPLY SWEET  by Kathy Schmitz

The little wall hanging I designed for this book is A Simple Sampling. It features 30 designs, so you can pick out the ones that speak to you.  It's a fun and relatively simple procedure with much-added embroidery work.  

There are also several pincushion patterns in the book.

What will you think of stitching these designs onto?  How about a quilt label? Or make them into little badges to pin to a jacket?  

Another fun feature is that you don't have to trace the designs if you don't want to!  You can purchase the preprinted fabric on Spoonflower!  All 64 designs are printed on their Petal Signature Cotton, and all 64 fit on one yard of fabric.  I left plenty of room between the images for cutting them apart and sewing them into things.  Remember, this is a digital print, meaning the ink is applied to the dry fabric and sits on the material.  This makes the material stiffer to work with than lovely quilting fabric. I recommend washing it before stitching to make it softer.  It also gets softer the more you handle it.

You can find the fabric here - SPOONFLOWER

You must order 1 yard of their Petal Signature Cotton to get all 64 images.

I hope you have fun stitching up these little designs!

Kathy