Recently on Sewing With Nancy she featured two very worthwhile charities that provide needed items for two worthwhile purposes.

The first is Little Dresses for Africa which is a group that create dresses from pillowcases and then distribute them orphanages in Central Africa. They are a Christian-based, non-profit group that was started by a small group of women who had gone on a short-term mission trip. After returning home they looked for a way to help those in need. One of their group came up with a simple sewing design she had found on the net. Now with over 30,000 dresses made and delivered they are planting seeds of hope.

I plan to start shopping this month’s linen sales to gather together a dozen or so pillowcases, along with ribbon and trim. I’ll post pictures of the finished dresses before I send them off to the group. Then I’ll go out and shop for some more pillowcases.

The other group that has been featured on Sewing with Nancy was the Project Linus another non-profit group. They have many chapters across the country and provide blankets to various organizations. There are nearly 380 chapters and they have provided over 3,000,000 blankets! Each chapter knows what is needed in their area and makes sure the blankets go to the correct place. They make their way to sick children, those that have been traumitized, etc. The best thing is to go the site, find a chapter close to you, and see what their needs are.

Along with pillowcases I’ll be looking for fleece to embroider – a great project for my embroidery machine and lots of the “cute” designs I have.

With the New Year just beginning it’s a good time to start on projects. Will post updates on how I’m doing with the dresses and blankets.

It’s Pink Saturday again at Cottage Dreamer! Thanks to Beverly at How Sweet The Sound for once more hosting this fun day of sharing all things Pink!

For a long time I’ve had an embroidery machine and took it in some time ago to have it serviced so I could finally use it. After that it was a few months wait for a Magic Box to come in to the dealers – this is a small pieced of equipment that allows me to use digitized designs. I thought – at last – I can do some embroidery. No such luck. The machine had to be services once more. But now all appears to be well. Below are some pictures I took while doing a design from a fantastic set from Michelle’s Designs called Silk Ribbon Floral Fantasy.

I have a Deco 600 made by Bernina





This is the first of six thread changes that are needed.





Had to take the hoop off the machine because I was running out of bobbin thread. This is the embroidery after two colors have been stitched.





Finally, we get to the pink thread! There are three shades of pink used in the embroidery.





More Pink.





Here’s the finished embroidery. It takes about a half hour to complete which includes the thread changes that are needed.







I plan to use this and several other designs from this collection to make a quited wallhanging. Most likely I’ll also use the designs for some hand towels and I’m going to be looking at anything I buy in the way of clothing this fall to see if I can put some embroidery on it.

Thank you for stopping by and have a wonderful Pink Saturday!

Sandra