April Showers Bring May Flowers – a BIG embroidery project

a BIG embroidery project from Shiny Happy World

This is the last of the BIG embroidery projects I did for the Sulky booth at Spring Quilt Market.

Did I say big? It’s HUGE – 18 inches tall and 28 inches wide! It’s in one of those big oval quilt hoops you can find at Joann’s. The biggest one they had. It’s crazy big.

Here’s how I made it. . .

I sewed the strip of green solid fabric to the bottom of a strip of blue solid fabric. Easy peasy.

I appliqued the blue letters (here’s the free alphabet pattern) onto the blue fabric using fusible adhesive, and machine stitched around the edges in matching thread. No zigzag or satin stitch – just a simple straight stitch.

I stitched in all the flowers using the repeating floral pattern in the Continuous Stitches embroidery pattern.

But wait! How do you use printable embroidery transfer paper on a really big embroidery project – bigger than a sheet of paper?

I printed the floral pattern on multiple sheets of Sulky Sticky Fabri-solvy, laid them out in a repeat and stuck them to the fabric. It’s the same method I used on this cat, and I shared lots of detailed instructions and photos in that post.

I made the flowers fill the green area and spill up into the blue as if they were growing up into the sky.

Finally – I stitched the raindrops in dark blue on the light blue background. I wanted the raindrop stitches to be REALLY regular – more regular than my hand will do on its own – so I used the graph paper pattern in the same Continuous Stitches embroidery set to space them out. The raindrops themselves are just long lines of running stitches.

After I was done stitching I soaked away all the Sulky Sticky Fabri-solvy, ironed the piece dry, and put it back in the same enormous hoop for framing.

I used a single strand of Sulky Petites thread for all the stitching.

Here it is all by itself. That’s one really big embroidery project!