Hi, just popping in to show you the cute little tote I made today! Lydia will be using this for dance school, so it was important for it to be washable, since it will be getting a lot of use. I used regular cotton fabric in Lydia's current favorite color (blue) and reinforced it with Decor Bond to make it sturdier.
The little embroidered ballet shoes design was a good bit of work. I flipped it left-to-right so that I could write her name across the toes going uphill instead of downhill. Then I imported the letters for her name and had to resize and rotate each one separately and line them up at an angle over the toes.
I interfaced both pink fabrics before appliqueing them so that the blue background wouldn't shadow through and rob them of their vibrancy. And the design calls for the darker pink to be appliqued on TOP of the pink dot, but I wanted it to look like it was behind the pink dot instead. That took a couple of extra steps on the embroidery machine to accomplish, but I like the result.
I couldn't decide whether to add the rickrack, but my husband liked it, saying it sort of echoed the wavy shoelaces. (And YES, I did almost fall over when he said that, because usually he doesn't have a clue about that kind of stuff. But he was RIGHT! Shhh, don't tell him I said he was right - it will go to his head!)
The colors in the picture above are a bit salmon-y...the top picture is much more accurate. Anyway, after all that pink fanciness, the handles looked a little plain and blue. I found a delicate (WAVY, like the shoelaces and rickrack!!) decorative stitch on my sewing machine and dressed them up a little bit!
Now Lydia can use her brand-new tote tomorrow at dance class.
