Behind the Scenes... Making a Princess!

One of the most popular items in my shop right now is the Very Pretty Princess Felt Paper Doll Set.  So, today I will show you how exactly one of these princesses are made.

A new trend I'm exploring within my shop includes items that are done solely with an embroidery machine and completed in the hoop.  With machine embroidery, the material a person intends to embroider must be hooped to keep it in place while the embroidery machine stitches out the selected pattern.

We start by gathering the fun materials that go into hooping.  Stabilizer is a paper like material that is placed in the hoop first.  See that ginormous roll?  That is 100 yards (read: 300 feet!!) of stabilizer purchased specifically for my felt creations.  There are many different stabilizers out there.  We chose tearaway for our projects.  I am also using an approximately 6X10 hoop.

Once the stabilizer is in, the fun begins.  We find our Caliegh pattern on the machine, attach the hoop and thread the machine.  You probably can't see her, but she is in the middle row, all the way at the end.  : ) Cell phone camera pics and a digital screen clearly don't mix.

Hard to see, but there she is.  : ) 

Now, we let the machine do its magic.  Starting with the outline, then attaching color by color, and finally the details!

Waalaah!  She's done and ready to be trimmed and cut away from the extra felt!  Total time?  About 20 minutes per Princess doll.  

Kind of a boring first "real" post, but I thought it would be fun to show you how I spend pretty much every hour of my day.  ; )