Spring has sprung in New Jersey.  Everyone is out and about walking and enjoying the beautiful trees as they bloom. That is here in New Jersey, apparently Mother Nature has a few things confused and my grandchildren in Colorado are still wearing their snow boots. Don’t forget though that back in February they were running around in their shorts.

The other part of spring is baseball.  My DIL is team mom for her little guys' team and she has volunteered to make the team banner.  Coming from my corner that means that we surely should have some sewing and embroidery going on in the banner.  Last evening we rolled out the felt and started to work.  We decided to combine sewing and gluing in the interest of time since opening day is this Sunday.

Our banner will show the names of the team, league and players as well as an image of a baseball diamond and baseball bats.  It was fun to draw and cut out some of the images but when it came to the letters I quickly took out the Brother lettering card.  Not only could I create appliquéd letters but as the letters were finished in the embroidery hoop I could easily cut out the shape and arrange the letters on the banner.  That’s where the glue came in.  I certainly could have sewed the letters on but we are time challenged, so glue it was for the letters.

We also decided that it would be cute to make 16 baseballs out of white felt with the boy’s names embroidered on them.  Now I could really have fun.  For any of you who have an embroidery machine from Brother….have you used the Frame patterns?  They are so cool.  I selected the satin stitch circle, enlarged it to about 4 inches and then using the Embroidery Edit feature on the machine I added the boys names.  I put as many as I could fit in the largest frame of the Innovis and then added the names….There is a good reason for doing it in that order.  All the balls would embroider first, one less color change.  Secondly, I could easily go back and delete the names each time I had to create a new group.

If I have an Innovis or Duetta from Brother I can also have fun using the Drag & Drop feature to move the balls around the frame and the same with the names. I also loved the fact that it was so easy to create one baseball and simply touch the duplicate button to quickly make another.  Sew Simple!

We used gros grain ribbon at the edges of the banner for security and appearance.  I don’t have a photo of the finished project yet since it is a project in the works but I promise to post it shortly.

Have a great day and don’t forget I would love to hear what types of creative things you are doing with your embroidery machine.