Use a simple sewing machine to machine embroider!

At our school, we celebrate Juffendag, "teacher day" every year.  This is when all the teachers celebrate their birthday together and the children get to have a day of fun away from studies.  Teacher Day usually coincides with the end of the school year and is very much looked forward to by my two girls. I wanted to make the teachers something useful as well as include a contribution from my girls and here is what I came up with.  I got the idea from this super blog.  I loved the idea of embroidering an artwork done by my girls, but I wanted to make more of a beach bag than a book bag. 

Isn't this sweet?  It is a mermaid drawn by my 4 year old... yes a mermaid, really!

 

Here is a boy mermaid drawn by my 6 year old - note the "bra".

This lovely mermaid princess also drawn by my 6 year old.

This happy sunflower drawn by my 4 year old

As much as I loved this idea, I wasn't going to be hand embroidering these drawings as I work so sloooowly.  I decided to do them on my machine.  Here are some close up views...

These embroideries might not be as slick looking as something done on a fancy embroidery machine, but I think they have a bit of soul and evidence of a creative hand at work!

Here is the how to:

Machine Embroidery with a Simple Sewing Machine.

My sewing machine is basic.  It has no extra bells and whistles apart from a handful of fancy stitches and buttonhole stitch.  Oh, and it can sew backwards and has a light, so I suppose if we're splitting hairs here.....

First of all I got my little artists to make a lovely drawing for their teacher.  This was a bit of an uphill battle so I suggest if you want to do this without stress, keep an eye out for "usable" drawings that your child might make and save them for later use.

I had some white cotton fabric scraps in my stash that were just right for this project.

I scanned and printed off the artwork and then laid that directly onto my fabric and pinned in place.

 

On the reverse I pinned some thin paper.  This is a paper bag the haberdashery guy at the market uses, double layer, but not as thick as copier paper.  If you don't have these bags a till slip would also work.

Now you're ready to get sewing.  I set my machine to a button hole zig-zag, because I wanted a thick line.  I liked the chunky lines of the felt tip pen and that was the best stitch I could think of to replicate it.



Now start sewing.  Just go on and sew directly over the paper.  I didn't lower the feed dogs and I used a medium needle on this project.  The paper underneath helps the fabric slide and move fairly easily and on tight corners I simply lifted the foot up while the needle was still down in the fabric and swiveled the drawing around. 

I found that it was easier to follow the lines if I went over them first in pencil and drew in lines that weren't really showing up.

It is tricky to do this but if you go slowly and use your hand to work the machine on tricky bends you can follow quite accurately.

On larger areas I just opted to sew straight lines up and down, but where it was obvious a line went a bit squiggly I tried my best to follow that line as accurately as possible.

On my machine I can set the width of the zig-zag buttonhole stitch, and I found this useful when the drawn lines became naturally thinner as the pen was lifted off the page.

Now the fun part..the reveal!  I used these tweezers to help pull off the teeny bits of paper in the detailed work.  It was a little bit fiddly, but my 6 year old was happy to help!

This technique is a little bit like appliqué with out the fabric and is really fun to do.  Please forgive me if I've been unclear in my instructions, I'm on a steep learning curve here and I'd love to hear any feedback.

Happy Sewing!