My brother and sister-in-law just had a baby girl a couple weeks ago named Adalyn Olivia. Andrea, the mother, asked me to embroider a birth sampler and I was more than happy to oblige. After tons of internet research and an entire month's worth of work I came up with this:
Before we get started on the "making of" I'd like to introduce Adalyn Olivia. She was born on November 19th at 1:58am. She weighed 7 pounds, 2 ounces. Here she is on her birthday:
Alright, so the whole thing started with Andrea asking me to make the sampler in October. I googled birth samplers and drew inspiration from the ones I thought looked the best. I was mainly searching for information to include like place of birth, time of birth, the alphabet, numbers, etc. I knew I wanted a quote so I picked one by Henry David Thoreau. I found stamps of the crib design and the duck border at my local craft store, and then I came up with the sketch pictured below. It's a very rough draft so please excuse the drawing!
I found a bird pattern on Flickr that had a male and female. I made a few changes like leaving off the legs and heart the male was holding and altering one of the tails. I cleaned up the borders and added some of the text on the computer, then drew on the rest to make the second draft, pictured below. At this point Adalyn had about 2 weeks to go before she was born so I had to leave off all the baby information besides the place of birth. This next picture shows the names of most of the fancy stitches I used but in the end I changed where most of them are placed.
Here is progress shot #1 taken on November 12th:
Progress shot #2 taken on November 17th:
Progress shot #3 taken on November 29th:
And here it is all finished:
I used 16 stitches total. Here's a list and some of the places you can find them:
Running - the purple border
Back - items like the cribs, Papa Bird's hat, Mama Bird's bandana, the lettering, duck, etc.
Stem - the two bird bodies, the orange line between the alphabets, the stems
Satin - the bright pink flower buds in the top section, the smaller blue flowers
Lazy Daisy - the purple flowers, the leaves
Checkered Chain - the line above the birth weight that alternates light and dark pink
French Knots - the inside of the sunflower, the bright blue dots, lower case "i"
Scalloping Chain - the sunflower petals
Scroll - the yellow dividing lines on either side of the birth weight
Chained Feather - the blue dividing line above the ducks
Cross Stitch - the variegated line below the ducks
Cable Chain - the yellow dividing line under the alphabets, above the birth place
Whipped Spider - the pink "star" shapes on either side of the numbers
Feather - the bright pink dividing line above the quote
Couching - the green and blue line dividing the numbers and birth place
Chain - the blue lines dividing the cribs and the quote
I'm very pleased with the way it turned out even though I struggled with it quite a bit, especially the colors and stitches to use. I know the parents are going to love it and I'm so proud to have made something that will hopefully become a family heirloom.
I've added a couple close-up shots below. The first one is of the Whipped Spider stitch:
Some of the highlights in this pic are the Cable Chain stitch and Feather stitch:
Last up we've got the flowers. Some of the fancy stitches are the Checkered Chain, Scroll, and Chained Feather:
Thanks for checking out my project!
**Edited to add: The font I used is called yummah strawberriez and it's in an 8 1/2" x 11" frame.
