Hi ladies! Welcome to this month’s Designers Challenge! Suzanna here this month to challenge you to stitch it up! One of the things that has stood the test of time for me when it comes to scrapbooking and preserving my families memories is stitching, sewing on my layouts. My Mum is a contemporary quilter, her mother was quilter, seamstress and embroider, her mother was a seamstress. As you can see, there is quite a bit of sewing in my maternal roots. I prefer to sew on paper! My challenge to you this month is to hand stitch on your project. No machine stitching – just good old ol’ fashioned needle and thread (or embroidery floss) that you push up and down manually.

Lisa created the above layout and used hand stitching in two different and ingenious ways! First, Lisa anchored the acetate phrases using hand stitching with her embroidery floss (the rest of us all used our staplers)! When I first saw her layout, I thought to myself “well, duh! Why didn’t I think of that?” As if that wasn’t creative genius enough, Lisa then stitched under her journaling! Instead of using the traditional pen to underline and draw your eye to her story, she did a running stitch under each and every line! You can always count on Lisa to be creative and think out of the box!

The above layout is my example for this challenge. I added the stitching around the heart to add the homemade feeling of a quilt. The patterned paper reminded me of a traditional quilt so I added a few of the June kit embellishments for some visual interest. To complete the homey feeling I just poked holes around the outer edges of the heart and set to work pushing the needle up and down. Hand stitching on your layouts is one of those rhythmic things that you can do sitting in front of the TV and not really pay much attention. Just make sure you don’t miss any holes!

Depending upon the floss you use, you may need to whittle down the number of threads you are using. In the above close up of my layout, I used 3 (of the 6) DMC threads. If I were to use much more, the holes would be too noticeable and I would have used up a lot more embroidery floss. I prefer to hand stitch with embroidery floss than baker’s twine. I find that baker’s twine doesn’t hold it’s twist well and loses the crisp look of the intertwining.

A closer look at a few of the embellishments that I used to fill the heart with love!

So now it’s your turn. We would love to see your layouts featuring hand stitching. You don’t need a Cocoa Daisy kit to play. Everyone is welcome. Please leave a link to your hand stitched project/layout by Wednesday, July 6th, 8pm EST. One winner will be picked and will receive a $5 gift voucher to spend in the Daisy Store.