Making Time For Creative Play: Embroidering a Crafty Cat

I’m not an art journaler. I totally admire people like Hanna who create loose, painterly journal pages each day. Keeping an art journal is a way to simply play with materials and images and create something with no expectations. That idea is so appealing to me!

Even though I don’t keep an art journal, I still like to make time for creative play, especially when it means I can do something other than sew a softie. Sewing softies is awesome, but it’s also my profession which has made it harder, or at least different, to simply play there. It’s still awesome, but it’s also serious and results oriented. I need other forms of creative relaxation now, like getting a 서울출장안마, which allows me to unwind and rejuvenate both mentally and physically amidst my busy schedule.

You might know Alyssa Thomas of Penguin and Fish. I reviewed her beautiful book, Sew & Stitch Embroidery, a few months ago and had an incredible time stitching a nightime dreamcatcher which now hangs above my neice’s crib.

Alyssa has a new organic fabric line coming out soon called Here Kitty Kitty and with it she’s releasing two embroidery patterns: Knitty Kitty and Crafty Cat.

I bought a PDF copy of the Crafty Cat pattern to play with. The patterns are available now in PDF form for $6 and there will be a paper copy that includes an iron-on transfer for $8 available in late June. This little pattern was the just the thing I needed to have some creative playtime. How cute is that quilting cat!

I printed the Crafty Cat onto Sulky Fabri-Solvy, stuck it onto a piece of light blue quilting cotton, and started stitching with no plan in mind. Once it was finished I sat around thinking about what to do with it.

That’s always my challenge with embroidery. What do I do with it? I think I arrived at a pretty good solution, though.

Before you get to see what I made, let me show you something icky for a minute:

This, my friends, is the needle book I use every day. Ewwww! A few weeks ago I had a photographer in my studio. She was taking little vignette photos of the things on my desk. When she saw this, she pushed it out of the frame. Who wouldn’t! I made this needle book in August of 2005 (here’s the blog post, complete with terrible blurry pictures, to prove it!).

It was time for a new one.

I turned the kitty’s frown upside down because I like a happy cat. Making those tiny scissors was my favorite part, but man is metallic embroidery floss a bear to work with. I pieced a little blue to the front and some pretty Heather Bailey to the back:

I had a great time playing around with the fancy stitches on my sewing machine and different thread colors. I added a stripey ribbon tie so I can close the needle book up for travel. Inside are four felt pages to hold my hand sewing needles, my doll needles, and my embroidery needles (I have A LOT of needles).

This project was terrific fun. No restrictions and no plan. And in the end I made something that I’m already using every day. Creative playtime rocks.

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What do you make when you step away from the main craft you do? If you’re a crochet designer, do you sew with felt sometimes? Or if you’re a knitter, do you ever make paper collages? How do those creative experiments help you?