Needle & Thread

This past month we had birthdays/holidays galore at my house. June is always a bit nutty between end of the school year and all the birthdays. I turned to my trusty needle and {embroidery} thread to make some personalized gifts.

For one of my favorite friends, I made a family tree.
I embroidered all her family names on the green polka dot fabric.
I embroidered the family name sign for the tree.
I cut out the tree, heart and leaves.
Then top stitched (via sewing maching) them all to the
plaid fabric. A layer at a time.
I framed it in an 11x14 frame.
I love the way it turned out (if I do say so myself).
I chose to blur the names here for {obvious} privacy reasons.
Hopefully you still get the jist of it:

It combined my love of sewing and embroidery.

I also made some gifts for my teachers at my photography workshop.
I asked them to take pictures of their gifts for me because I ran out of time
and didn't get to take them myself before I gave them to Kim & Jennifer.
I used Elsie's camera pattern & put their logos on the lens.
They were just a tad different from each other based
on what I knew of them from their blogs.
Kim was nice enough to send me some pictures:

She sure knows how to rock a camera.
Thanks to her I have a new profile pic!
(the one up there on the left sidebar <----------)
{I'll post the picture of Jennifer's gift when I get one from her}

If you are as crazy into embroidery as I am, here are a few ideas/patterns:
Wild Olive is fabulous.
She has a downloadable workshop each month.
I particularly love the month of April.
And she has a flickr acct with free patterns here.
Felt aquarium magnets from The Purl Bee
Tangarang's woodland creatures
Lollychops has a great embroidery pattern section

One Red Robin's little bear pattern
And for the basics- Embroidery 101 at Instructables

Or take a look at my old embroidery posts-
over ther ----------> on the right sidebar under needle arts.

{Have you done any embroidery projects lately?
Care to share?}