Turning Children's Artwork into Framed Embroidery

Kids often draw the most amazing things.  As Sprat neared 5 he started getting quite creative with his drawing and I started to amass a pile of my 'favourite' drawings.  I had a few that I really loved and wanted to do something more with and decided to turn one of them into an framed embroidery piece.

This is a really quick project.  If you are not me.  I started this in September last year ... it then sat around for months, got packed and shifted house, got dragged away on holiday with me twice, lived in a suitcase for over 2 months and I finally finished it today.  It took me two nights of work in total to complete, spread over 5 months.  I can be VERY slow at things sometimes ...

First thing was to pick a picture.   I had three of my favourites to choose from, and decided on the Robot.

I decreased him down to the size I wanted on the photocopier, then using my fancy light box (sellotaping it to the window....), traced it onto linen using an erasable marker.

As linen is see through, and I was using red thread, I used a piece of backing fabric to reduce the show through of stitching from the back of the fabric.  And no fancy securing of the two fabrics - I just put the two on top of each other and secured together in the embroidery hoop.

I stitched using back stitch, washed away the erasable marker with a wet white cloth and trimmed the edging down and glued it to the back of the hoop with Mod Podge to secure.  I have to confess here, my hoop is a little bit broken from living in a suitcase for so long.  I just glued that too.  One day it might pop off the wall and unravel, but lets hope not.