{insert clever title}... erm, "hoop"?

Apologies for the lack of a clever title, and perhaps a bit of a strange post.  I had a migraine last night after I'd gone to bed so I haven't had much sleep and the tablets make me a bit "odd" the next day.  Add to that an hour in a traffic jam this morning and it leads to one discombobulated Wendy.  I'm not entirely sure what discombobulated means, but I like it as a word.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the last of the presents for Jacob... so far.  Of course, he will get many, many more but this is what I've made for him for his birth.  The cotton reel on the photo above is not a part of the design, but more a way of keeping his identity secret!  This is a whacking great 10" hoop and the owl design is taken from Mary Englebright's Stitched so Cute (Yay, another one off the craft book challenge).

The background is a simple white cotton, the applique is from my scrap bag and I added some stitching on his belly.  I wrote the wording freehand using my fading fabric pen.  It usually fades after about 10 minutes, meaning I have to keep drawing over it again and again.  This time, I wrote it in the fading pen to get it right, then went over it lightly with my new Frixon pen so that I could still see the writing when the pen faded.  It didn't.  It hadn't faded when I presented it to my brother!  Talk about sod's law.  I stitched the letters with all 6 strands of a variegated thread in a simple back stitch.

The branch was done is stem stitch as were most of the outlines, and the leaves are done in fly stitch.

I finished it off by wrapping the hoop in strips of this lovely Amy Butler print which I think goes well with the colours I used.  I added felt to the back using this tutorial from The Trouble With Crafting.

So that's it.  No tales of crashing my car this weekend.  Just a stinky blocked drain and a microwave that's packed up.  Oh the excitement of my life.