Crafty Chic's: Eileen Hull - A Stitch In Time - Bella Crafts Connections Event

This morning I took the Eileen Hull - A Stitch In Time Workshop at the Bella Crafts Connections Event at the Mall Of America. She was showing us how to use her new Stitchlits line of dies.

They will cut tiny holes into a huge variety of materials and then you can just add the stitching with your favorite thread, embroidery floss, ribbon or yarn. This idea kind of reminded me of when those stitching stamps were the hot thing in the card making world, but this takes it a step farther with REAL stitching.

You can use these dies on so many projects. Here are a few that Eileen had on display.

I love that there really is no wrong way to stitch these. She even included some stitch examples for us. If anyone has done cross stitch or remember those plastic canvas projects from the 80's . . . well then you can do these.

The project we did in the workshop was a 6"x 6" matted image. I totally forgot to take a photo of the example one that Eileen had at the class. If I get a photo of it later today, I will add it to this post.

We cut an embroidery hoop image out of both a teal mat board and a wood grain that was mounted on top of a piece of white mat board. I was talking to someone at my table when I ran the wood grain on white through the Big Shot so it was not quite centered. Ooops.

Then I looked at my teal cut and it seemed more centered so I ended up using THAT as my main piece for the project. I saved the other half to use for something else. Since we cut the same shape from both colors, after you had them cut you just "puzzle piece" them together with each other.

Next was the hardest part for me . . . decided WHICH dies I wanted to use! There are some that will just do the holes for stitching, like in the product photos at the top of this post. There are others that to flowers, stems and leaves. Some cut the shape. Some cut just the holes for the stitching. Some cut BOTH the shape with stitching inside of it. This allows you to choose your own combinations and layer things (but for me it was just too many choices!)

While I was at the workshop, on one piece of fabric I cut an argyle stitching off to the side, and then started to build a flower. I was going to layer several colors and sizes of flower shapes . . . so I just started to cut all kinds of flowers until something came to me. The problem was, the idea that came to me was NOTHING like how I had started. Luckily we were each given 2 pieces of fabric. So I cut the stitching into my second piece of fabric and took the flowers I had cut home so I could put the project together.

For this example, I ran the chevron stitching on the fabric in one direction, then I turned the fabric and ran it the other direction. You want to do this and NOT run the die through the Big Shot with the die turned horizontally . . . that will put too much pressure on the rollers if that die is trying to cut ALL of those little holes at once.

Now it was time to start stitching. This was nice since I could sit and do it while watching television. I decided to use both teal and yellow thread to give even more color to the stitching. I knotted the two colors together so that I could stitch them both at the same time.

Next it was on to the flower. I decided to use a pale pick flower cut from felt. I wanted the flower to pop off the fabric and have some dimension to it.

I tried a couple of different variations of how to stitch it in order to give it more depth, but in the end what seemed to work the best was just a straight stitch that I pulled on slightly to tighten it and make some of the petals "pucker".