Dusting off my embroidery attachment...

Hello lovely readers. I hope that everyone has had a nice week. I have been staying really busy in order to better distract myself from diet induced hunger, and some of that busy work has turned out quite nicely!

A few days ago I was at Ikea looking for fabric for an apron project (more on that later) and I stumbled across these lovely kitchen towels.

I have long put off embroidering kitchen towels, something I have deemed a home decor essential... to be done some rainy day when I run out of things to do (as if I could) but these appealed to me enough to jump their way to the top of the to-do list.

So I pulled out my trusty embroidery attachment and plugged it into my machine. Here is how it went down. There were two towels and I wanted to do each of them exactly the same, so that involved some measuring. In order to get both the same, I started by embroidering a practice piece first so that I could know exactly where in the embroidery frame the embroidery would end up.

I was aiming for the bottom right corner, which is where the lovely checked towel border forms a corner. I positioned the machine as far lower right as it would go, and then did my practice run.

 Once the embroidery was finished, I measured exactly how far from each frame edge the top left of the "D" in Depew ended up and made a note of it. And just in case I lost that note (happens more often than you would think) I made a quick basting stitch along the border of my practice run. I can save this for later and maybe it will work with another project.

I decided that I wanted the embroidery on my towels to be 2" from the border on each edge so I did some measuring and marked in a blue basting stitch where I needed the "D" to start.

Getting the towel exactly in the right spot in the embroidery frame was ridiculous and frustrating but I eventually got it in place.

Once I hit "start" on my machine, the needle automatically repositioned itself to the starting point, and hovered quite obediently right over my little blue basting stitch. Needless to say, I was quite pleased with myself.

 Once finished I clipped my threads I repeated the entire process with the second towel. Naturally it went much more smoothly the second time around.

After several ironing's I still couldn't quite get rid of the embroidery frame crease on the towel, but I'm sure that a good washing will do the trick.

Voila, my lovely custom kitchen towels that are so white and crisp I can't bring myself to actually wipe my hands on them, thus completely defeating the purpose.

My husband had a great laugh about this and after two days of me walking about the kitchen with wet hands, both towels ended up looking too fancy to touch in my nice black and white guest bathroom. We'll let our friends deal with the towels that scream "don't touch me!" and make a game of seeing how many people leave the guest bath with wet hands.

It's a Depew thing.

P.S. I have been curious for a while now. How does the blog width and picture size work for you? Is it too wide or just right? Do you have to scroll over to read content? Are the pictures too big? I have a very wide screen monitor so it looks normal to me but I know that's not the case everywhere. I just want to make sure that the blog is as easy to read as possible. I would really appreciate your feedback!