First time in a looooooooong time

I made a thing with my embroidery machine!

 

It's our youngest DGD's birthday shortly, she'll be 15.     Now that my sewing space is organised, I thought I would try and make her a card.

 

She loves playing football, so I thought I'd try and find something relevant.     I found a design for a book cushion which had something suitable, on the Memories in Thread website. I'd gone to look for a football ginger that I know Sue has done,  but I saw this design and chose it instead. 

 

I amended the design a little. It originally referred to books as well as football, so I tool that text out and removed the book that the girl was holding.  I  added DGD's name, strategically placed to hide the gap left by my removing the book.   Finally, I simplified the colours so the text was just 2 colours instead of 3,  and I added a border. I had to tweak it one last time so that it would fit easily in my largest Durkee EZFrame.  I did all of this over the last couple of evenings, so that all I had to do today was stitch it out.

 

For the stitch out   I used Filmoplast for the stabiliser, and stitched onto felt.    Felt shouldn't really need any additional stabiliser,  but I really wanted to make sure this worked first time.

It was quite a long stitch out (86 minutes plus threading up and changing part way through) but it was relatively pain free.  I did have some thread breaks,  mainly caused by the "sticky" from the Filmoplast stabiliser getting on to the needles.  I had slowed the max speed down to minimise this.

It's all cut out now and stuck to an A3 card, folded. I had to stick a second card inside, to help support the weight. 

I hope she likes/appreciates it.