I started this wedding gift for a close friend an embarrassingly long time ago (no, I won't say how long). When I started it, she'd just graduated from med school (she's now a pediatrician), and has a dry sense of humor, and she also loves handmade crafty things (she knitted all through med school lectures). One of my favorite wedding gifts was a set of hand-embroidered day-of-the-week tea towels my mom made for me -- it's a perfect touch for a newlywed kitchen. So for Lauren, instead of using a standard fruit or flower pattern, I opted to make my own from anatomical diagrams of various human organs.
Here's the complete set. I took the pictures before washing and ironing, so some are a bit rumpled. Sunday's the heart, Monday's the eye, Tuesday's the kidney, Wednesday's the lungs, Thursday's the brain, Friday's a neuron (I was running out of interesting-looking organs), and Saturday's the pancreas.
The French knots for the alveoli were super fun to do. I found my favorite patterns were the ones combining different stitch types, rather than just stem stitch.
Isn't a neuron cute?
It's the combination of colors and stitches that made me really like the pancreas. After a week's worth of designs in mostly purplish-red and sickly gray-pink, being able to stitch in this vibrant green was a treat. The shiny part you see in the pancreatic duct is what I used for transfer paper -- I'm posting a tutorial on that tomorrow.
Now, to get these in the mail!
See these in progress on this Sneak Peek Sunday.
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Spied these on the embroidery flickr group page and followed your link here. What awesome towels! I'll bet your friend will adore them. Did you do the patterns yourself?
ReplyDeleteThanks for stopping by! I hope she likes them. I did the patterns myself, from diagrams I found doing a quick internet image search. So not exactly freehand drawings, but not commercial patterns either.
ReplyDeleteGenius!!!!! I love them.
ReplyDeleteWow, these turned out wonderful! How creative you are Megonian!! :)
ReplyDeleteThanks, Beth and Rose! I've been working on these so long, I'm amazed I actually finished them. Choosing which organs to do was the hard part -- I got really stumped toward the end of the project, and that slowed me down.
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