Embroidery Excitement: Baby Baskets

The latest acquisition to my closet of a craft room is a Brother Embroidery Machine. It’s a starter machine that allows me to embroider anything 4×4″ or less, but I can make magic happen in 4 square inches, let me tell you. I’ve been spending most of my newly acquired machine embroidery skills on baby clothes. It basically works like this: I download a design off of etsy, fiddle around with it and add some text on my embroidery software, spray some adhesive to stick a stabilizer on my clothing item (onesie, t-shirt, hat, etc.), hoop it, transfer my design from my computer to the machine via USB, choose my colors, and then I let the machine do all the work. 20 minutes later and I have a brand new baby present. Not bad for 20 minutes. Since I’m all about the instant gratification, 20 minutes is a lot better than the 4-8 hours it takes me to sew a dress or blanket. Needless to say, my latest go-to baby shower presents are all embroidered.

For all the crafters out there, I highly recommend an embroidery machine, but I don’t want to kid you- it’s quite an investment. You need the machine, software, stabilizers, threads, bobbins, and then once you have all that, hours of time to invest in learning the darned things (thank you YouTube). And then, after all that, you’re gonna want to upgrade your machine and spend thousands of dollars just to be able to embroider an 8×11″ area. It’s never ending, but fun and I love it.

Here are a few of the things I’ve made so far. The boy basket includes a few onesies for my nephew Alex (my brother is a firefighter), plus a personalized carseat canopy and ring sling. The girl basket was for my friend D’s daughter Olivia, and includes onesies, a hat and bib set, a car seat canopy, and a ring sling. I think every new mom loves seeing her baby’s name on something handmade, don’t you?