Baby Girl Project

I'm really excited because soon I'm headed to Kansas City to meet my new baby cousin Lizi. She's actually the daughter of my cousin Will and his wife Sami. Will was my childhood neighbor and best friend. Lizi was born less than a week after my wedding and he still flew down to be there for it. He just barely got home in time for her birth. Now I get to go visit him and his family in their new house for the first time, and meet the new baby girl!

I wanted to bring her something special and I've had a thing for Mary Poppins lately, so I came up with this little outfit I wanted to put together. Lucky for me, my good friend Ashley from Quilted Affair just got a new embroidery machine! She hadn't even gotten a chance to test it out yet, being so busy with her Etsy shop and wedding plans. But I asked her if I could experiment with it and try to make something. So she was super awesome and let me come over and play with the fancy new machine!

It really wasn't very easy. We had to keep tweaking the settings and checking the book to learn HOW to tweak the settings, and embroidering tests on a piece of scrap fabric.

There were quite a few issues along the way. We had to change the thread type, use a different type of stabilizer backing, adjust the thread tension, it just seemed like one thing after another! It was a good thing I bought a 6-pack of onesies, because even after we thought we had the settings right using the test fabric, there was a bit more tweaking to do.

A few of the knots and snarls I made on the first onesie.

The first attempt resulted in a tangle so bad we had to cut the onesie out of the machine!

I also managed to get some oil from the machine on the onesie. Thank goodness this all happened to the first one!

Finally I got all the settings right and set up another onesie to go on the machine. Here it is working away!

And here it is after it came off the embroidery machine! It actually worked!! I couldn't believe it!

We were so happy with how the embroidery turned out. For a first project with a machine we'd never used I'd say it was a big success! Now I just had to finish decorating it!

First I ironed some cute patterned fabric onto adhesive paper. Then I cut out a little kite and some bows to go on the tail. Here it is all set up.

It's already looking cuter!

Then I just added some paint trim to finish it off!

I'm so excited!! I can't believe I did the whole thing! I couldn't have done the embroidery without the help of my friend Ashley, and I'm so glad she was willing to let me use her machine. It was so fun working together on it!

I bought the cutest little hoodie and skirt to finish off the outfit. I didn't even realize the hoodie had ears until I laid it out for the picture! How funny. I just love how the whole thing came together.

Isn't it cute? I can't wait to see her in it. By the way, I've got 4 more blank onesies if anyone wants to have a go at them!