Valentine's Day Tie Appliqué Shirt for Baby Boy

This weekend I welcomed the newest addition to my craft room -- a new embroidery machine.  My wonderful husband bought it as an early birthday present.  My birthday isn't until the end of the month, but he knew that with the baby coming I would have lots of opportunities to use it since I have been planning on working on burp clothes, bibs, and baby blankets.  So I spent the afternoon learning how to use the new machine.  And I even got an embroidery project done.

Here it is -- a Valentine's shirt with a tie appliqué for a baby boy.

I've been wanting to make a tie appliqué shirt, and decided to use the embroidery machine to make it a Valentine's themed shirt.  I found the template for the tie at the blog Crap I've Made.  I copied and pasted the template into a word document so I could make it a little bit bigger.

I used the embroidery machine to make the words "Be Mine" before cutting the tie shape.  Then I used paper back fusible webbing (also known as heat and bond) to adhere the tie onto the black shirt and used a zig zag stitch on my regular sewing machine to give the edges of the tie a finished look.  Here's a close up.

I think I still might add some suspenders and a few hearts to make it more festive, but considering I spent most of the day getting a feel of the new embroidery machine and figuring out how all the features worked, I am pretty happy with the product.

And here is my new addition to my craft room - the Brothers PE770.  I was very impressed with how easy it was to use.  I literally opened the box and was embroidering 20 minutes later.  

And with that, I'm going to get back to crafting.  I've got to finish dressing up this t-shirt.  Until next time, have a Sew Scrappy Day!

Personalized Wooden Heart Wall Hanging (Just Like Candy Hearts!)

I am starting to get in the Valentine's Day spirit and found a little time this week to make a wall hanging like one I found on Pinterest (here is the link to the original project).  And here is my version of the project, personalized for my family:

The entire project was under $10.  I hit a good sale at Hobby Lobby and bought the 7" wooden hearts for $1 a piece (50% off!), and I found the perfect red and white heart ribbon (the picture below shows a close up of the ribbon, as you can see in the close up below).  I painted each heart a different pastel color to emulate the look of candy hearts.  Then I added the names of each person in our family in red vinyl.  You could use scrapbook stickers to do this, but I used my Cricut and the Cricit Alphabet font cartridge to cut the letters out of vinyl so each name would fit perfectly onto the 5" wide heart.  Finally, I used hot glue to attach the ribbon to the wood hearts, and tied a bow on top.

I didn't want to give away the name we have picked out for the little baby boy we are expecting (which is due in only 2 months nows!) so I used the word baby as a place holder.  I did cut out the letters for the baby's real name and and tucked them away for next year.  The good thing about this vinyl is that it effortlessly peals off without marring the paint, so I can update that name easily when I get the decoration out for next year.

And here is a close up of the adorable heart patterned ribbon:

Well that is all for now!  Thanks for reading my post, and until next time be sure to have a Sew Scrappy Day!