Carved Heart Embroidery

Nerd alert: when I was a little kid, I loved doing embroidery and cross-stitching. I have vivid, happy memories of my mom helping me trace pictures from the Friend (a Christian kids’ magazine I loved) onto muslin to embroider, and I spent hours stitching away. (Maybe this is what’s wrong with kids these days . . . they don’t know how to cross stitch. I cross stitched, and I turned out swimmingly, ergo, today’s children should be cross stitching more. Embroider today for a brighter tomorrow!)

Unfortunately, I lost interest in it as time went on, and other hobbies stepped in to take needlework’s place. But a deep, beautiful, slightly inappropriate love affair with Allison’s embroidery on Little Lovelies (here are some of my favorites from her blog) made me want to pick it up again. Then I saw this project at Miss Lovie a few weeks before Christmas—a little heart carved in a tree, complete with initials. It seemed like exactly the sort of Christmas gift I could spend hours making for Jeff, who would not appreciate it at all. And I was right!

Isn’t that sweet? I normally don’t go for the cutesy-pootsy “we’re so in love”-type projects, but I thought this one was cute without making me want to gag at its hormonal teenaged romanticism.

The original tutorial includes a printable pattern that you can trace onto your fabric to stitch over. Someone--and I don’t want to name names, but someone in this house who has an absurd obsession with electronic gadgets and is about 2 feet tall--broke our printer, so I couldn’t take advantage of the pattern. I just sketched out something that looked vaguely similar to the pictures and got to work. Mine is also much larger than the one in the tutorial—something like 5 inches across instead of ornament-sized.

I really love how it came out. I’m not entirely certain what to do with a single piece of embroidery art . . . I think I may want to start embroidering again, make some more little pieces, and cluster them together on a wall somewhere. This little project revived a long-dormant interest in a hobby that I had all but forgotten about. But for now, there’s just the one, and it’s perched awkwardly on Jeff’s nightstand. Three cheers for useless Christmas gifts!