I have no idea what got into me to make such a fun pair of summer shorts...and yet, maybe I do know what inspired all this, and it started about 50 years ago!
I was putting away some scrapbooks and my old baby books my mom gave me. She was not a great journaler, (is that a word?) but she was great at keeping cards and newspaper clippings. I even found a newspaper clipping with a picture of the doctor who delivered me once upon a time in long ago Oceanside, California. How cool is that. Anyway, I ran across my little baby jacket, which she also gave me. Circa 1961. Now that I love to embroider, I really noticed and appreciated the delicate bunny embroidering on my tiny jacket. That would be a vintage design now!
Love this little bunny embroidery! It looks like they quilted the little jacket after they embroidered it rather than before.
When I started staring at this little jacket, I thought about trying to replicate the bunnies on it. But I realized I just wanted to embroider some clothing. When you're an artist, the idea of actually wearing your own art is quite fun! So I pulled out this old pair of green army pants, with lots of pockets. The pants are too baggy on me now (thank goodness) so I decided to make them into cutoffs, and embroider the daylights out of them! I cut them off to the right length with pinking shears, and then, of course, they laid on the ironing board for about two weeks. And finally, just a week ago or so, I got started on them.
This also made me realize I need to buy a couple of wonderful embroidery books--but in the meantime, I just made things up to embroider on these cutoffs. I knew I wanted doodles and flowers, and that's all I knew. It's funny though, because once you get started on something like this, the creative muses can carry you away to so many places. I didn't even know what colors I wanted to embroider with. I am a regular DMC Floss Queen--and yet, I had no idea what colors to get going with. So I pulled out a little box collection of the most popular DMC floss colors, and just started using those. Using a set collection made it all very easy.
I doodled a crown, because as I said, I'm a regular DMC Floss queen!
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| Three strands of floss to outline and satin-stitch. |
After I made the first of my doodle stitches and flowers on the front of the shorts, I blanket-stitched the pinked cutoff edge all the way around both legs. In the end, I had blanket-stitched three different colors around the cutoff edge, and I really like the results now.
Then, on the back, I started stitching some cute flowers. I outlined them (always using three strands of floss), satin-stitched to fill in, and used six strands of floss to straight-stitch the flower stems.
The last thing I'm going to do with these shorts is add one more of these flowers, doodling its way across the bottom of the back leg.
On the other side of the back, I stitched another flower and suddenly the flower was telling me that it wanted a little doodle bird resting on one of its stems. Soooo...I created a little doodle bird! The beauty of all of this is that I could keep stitching on these cutoffs forever...but...I have another pair to do! Yay!
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| I thought my doodle bird needed an eye button. |
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| One flower to go and I'm done! |
I think I REALLY need to wear these cutoffs every time I shop for embroidery supplies this summer! What do you think?
Eat, Write, Dream, and Floss Daily.
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