Baby Shower Gift

Hey y’all!, Ali here! It is stitching week! Yippee!! I absolutely love stitching on layouts, either hand stitching or machine stitching, I just love the detail and depth it adds to a layout. This week I decided to take stitching to a different project, and make a baby shower gift for a good friend. I know she is decorating the nursery with grey, teals, and yellows and the main focus will be giraffes. So I wanted to make a cute piece of home décor for her to put in her nursery!

I started with the giraffe. I found a cute clip art image of a giraffe and printed it out. The hardest part of this project is assembling the giraffe. I picked out the patterned papers I wanted to use, and got to cutting! I cut out each piece of the giraffe and then glued him together!

After I added a bit of water color to my background, I adhered the assembled giraffe. Then…the fun part, stitching! I use a paper piercer and simply go around the image exactly where I want to stitch. When all of my holes are made, I watch TV! Well, I watch TV and stitch! This project took me about an hour to complete (or three episodes of Young and Hungry).

TIP-New to stitching on paper? I know it can be intimidating, I was super nervous the first few times I did it too. I also would get really frustrated when my embroidery floss would get tangled and knotted. Then I discovered a super sweet trick, beeswax. If you pull your thread through beeswax before you start stitching, it holds together and never knots up on you. I didn’t have any beeswax on hand the first time I did this, I had used all of mine for lotion bars. So I just used the lotion bar which is mostly beeswax with a little lavender. So my thread smells lovely and doesn’t make me frustrated-win, win!

Now, for me, no project is complete without sequins! The brand new Ferris Wheel sequins were absolutely perfect for this project, they went with the color scheme and the different sizes and shapes add just the right amount of detail without taking away from the focus (his name and the giraffe).

A simple frame, and voila! This makes a great little gift for a baby shower!