Saturday, April 17, 2010

Quick & Easy Embroidered Teacher Gifts

It's getting to be that time of year again.  Now that we're back from Spring Break, it's full speed ahead to summer vacation.  If your kids are in preschool or elementary school, it's not too soon to start planning group gifts for those special classroom teachers.  Scrapbooks, photo albums, and group gift certificates are always nice, but I thought I'd share a quick but meaningful machine embroidered project that I came up with a few years ago for my son's preschool teachers.  All of the moms pitched in to buy two simple solid-color aprons.  The class had been working hard all year long on learning to print their names, so I got each child to write his or her name in marker on a white sheet of paper.  I scanned the signatures into my computer, cleaned up stray marks in Corel, and then used the Auto Digitize feature of my Bernina Artista embroidery software to convert each child's signature into a machine embroidery design.  Then I randomly stitched the children's embroidered signatures all over the aprons in different thread colors.  Ta da!


If I had this project to do over, I would have asked the mom who bought the aprons to get ones without pockets since I would have had to remove and reattach the pockets in order to embroider them and still have them be functional.  I was down to the wire, so I just embroidered around the pockets instead.  And if I was a little more comfortable with my digitizing software it would have been nice to angle the satin stitches around the curves of the letters for a more professional end result.  But the teachers loved their aprons and said they would wear them when they did craft projects with the kids, and the children enjoyed finding their signatures on each one and pointing them out. 

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Who's the little guy giving you the stink eye?

Rebecca Grace said...

Anders says that's Alan.