Ok, so my mom (Nanny to my kids) is a travel nurse. This makes it difficult to give her pictures of the kids to remember them by while she's away. She can't really drag around a bunch of framed pictures from city to city. So, I came up with this idea to have each of my kids (the two that are old enough anyway; my youngest is only 2) embroider a little picture that could then be made into a card. The card will stand up by itself and act as a sort of frame and the little piece of embroidery will warm her heart every time she looks at it
. Anyway, I asked my middle child, Sebastian, (he's 5) if he wanted to do that. Surprisingly, he was pretty into it. I asked him what kind of a design he would want if he could pick anything at all and he said "a heart inside of a heart inside of another heart" so I made that in AutoShapes and traced it out onto a piece of an old shirt of his. I ironed it down to some interfacing and then let him pick out his floss colors. I showed him how to do the first couple stitches and then he went at it by himself. Here are a few pictures of him working hard:
He does pretty much everything in his underwear, so why not embroidery, heeehee.
Here it is once he finished:
It's obviously imperfect and obviously done by a small child, but that's what I love about it. It's SO a little piece of him, know what I mean? BTW, those are his initials (S H) and the year at the bottom. Anyhow, then came the card-making part of things. I just have this template thing that I got from Hobby Lobby that allows you to make a card and envelope out of any kind of paper. I let Sebastian pick out the papers for the inside and outside of the card and we glued them together (he loves to use a glue stick, heh). We then glued his embroidery to the front of the card (after ironing, of course) and it looks like this:
Then we glued a piece of craft paper to the inside and I had him write a little message to Nanny. I told him to write whatever he wanted. Here's that:
In case it's hard to make out, it says "Nanny, I love you with three hearts". Awwww!! Also, I think it's hilarious that he then wrote his name in the top corner like he was at school or something.
Lastly, we made an envelope out of craft paper and used a cutout of one of the leftover bits of paper to seal it. Here's that:
Ok, the best part? I had the pictures of him working on it printed out and put them in the card. I know she'll cry when she gets it. My mom's a crier. But, I'm not gonna lie. I teared up a couple times when I looked over at him stitching away and concentrating so fiercely on something for his Nanny. He'd take a break once in a while and then he'd say "Well, back to sewing". It was great! My oldest (she's 10) will do one next.
P.S. Sorry that some of the pictures are so crappy. It was cold and cloudy and we had to take them inside.
