Last year I bought this lovely kit from Coast and Country Crafts and Quilts here in the UK. The pattern is Running Reindeer Table Topper by the Australian designer Lynette Aderson, and the kit included a selection of fabrics also designed by Lynette. The stitchery fabric is a tone-on-tone stars print by Makower UK, and the embroidery threads are by DMC and were also included in the kit. Once the patchwork blocks have been prepared and the borded added, the stitchery design is traced onto the background fabric, ready for the hand embroidery. My favourite pen to use for tracing the design is a Micron Pigma pen, in a pale brown (sepia) colour, in the finest nib - size 005...
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...I've used a lightweight fusible interfacing on the wrong side of the background fabric, to give the fabric a bit of "body" and I also use a wooden embroidery hoop to keep the fabric taught. Two strands of embroidery thread are used for the hand embroidery, and very simple stitches are used, just back stitch, satin stitch and running stitch. The finished piece of work is then pressed, and layered with the background fabric and wadding, ready for quilting...
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...I've quilted this very simply, in a cross hatch pattern over the star blocks. Simple machine quilting is continued around the outer border, and stitch-in-the-didtch for the inner borders. A narrow binding is added along the raw edges and mitred around the corners. The binding is then folded over to the back, and hand stitched in place using a ladder stitch...
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...obviously I needed a small hand embroidered label for my table topper. Usingf one of the hristmas trees from the original pattern, I traced this onto the centre and added my own words. As always, I've used a Micron Pigma pen, and used 2 strands of DMC embroidery thread to stitch over the tree and the words in back stitch. I pieced together some leftover scraps of fabric from the star blocks, then using Karen Kay Buckley Bigger Perfect Circle templates, I made an outer border for the embroidered label. The embroidered circle and the border were then hand stitched to the back of the table topper, making sure the stitches just went into the wadding, and didn't go through to the front of the topper...
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...and here's the completed table topper, ready to use over the festive period. Now I can get back to my long list of kits, and chose another project - maybe it will be another festive one?
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