(Almost) Always With RE

RE on the above title stands for Ribbon Embroidery.

You see, my first love in craft was with RE. I saw a beautiful ribbon embroidered blouse in a local mag, I called to ask the price which turned to be too much for my budget and lead me to learning all about those beautiful ribbon stitches, up until now. I learned it from books, AJ. Boesra's, Di Van Niekerk's, Chris Rankin's and Ann Cox's. After that, I bought many local ribbon embroidery books too (beside AJ. Boesra's) like Rosa Amalia's (which is my online friend here), Yossi Zulkarnaen's, Endang Rachminingsih's, and many more, for inspirations.

Whatever craft I made, I've tried to put ribbon embroidery in it, if possible, because not only I love the looks and doing it, but also I feel I owe my existence in the craft community to ribbon embroidery (Sounds too much, eh? Lol)

Now let's get to another story. Almost every crafter I know have an owl creation. I myself love the owl ever since I read Edward Lear's poem about "The Owl and The Pussycat" which I found both funny and cute. As the matter of fact, I made a pochette based on that poem.

As written above, almost every crafter I know have an owl creation. To the point where sometimes there are little bit of "clashes" where one "stole" other design, one claimed to be the best owl creator, and so on. While there is a strict rule between crafters that one can be inspired by others but NOT duplicating theirs (for commercial use), I think there's no problem if every crafter have an owl creation (of course, as long as it's not "pirated" pattern), the more the merrier . Now, I'd like to have one(s) too, but of course with my own rendition. Since I consider my self as a stitcher, these are my version of owl plushies:

To be honest, I was inspired by Aimee Ray's, but I'm sure, as you all can see, I'm not trying to be her . What do you think?

Heatnbond vs Pellon: An applique making experience

All Indonesian needleworks crafters I knew are crazy about cute designer's fabric, including my self.

It's like a trend now, everybody hunts for Alexander Henry's, Robert Kauffman's, Farbenmix, Suzy Ultman's, etc, or just something similar to their design.

I love the picture/pattern/characters on those cute piece of fabrics (I usually only bought fat quarter because it's quite pricey to me, heehee ), feel timid to cut them. So what I did was just turn them into appliques.

To make appliques, I was helped by this great product named HeatNBond.

It's a double sided fusible web, so convenience to use. We just iron the web on the fabric intended to be appliques, only for 2 seconds and it's ready to be cut. To stick the applique to other fabric (in my case, it's a cotton hijab) just peel the paper backing and iron it again, slightly longer than the first one. Because the fabric I use is a thin, sheer cotton, it only took 5 seconds to stick it. Although there's a "No Sew " wrote on the wrapping, I preferred to stitch it afterward, just to make sure that the applique stays strongly on the fabric.