tart and sweet at the same time

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This year I decided to give lemon sugar and dish towels to my friends. The local fabric store no longer carries dish towel cloth (can you imagine?), but they sent me to the dollar store (can you imagine?) where I found these vibrant towels just waiting to brighten the lives of people I love.

The lemon sugar was so simple to make and the whole house smelled of brightness, of summer, of energy. I’d been collecting sweet little jars as we finished the contents, and had a lovely assortment to use.

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I used a little double-sided tape to help the ribbon stay put. The tags were something that I wanted to be special – somehow I’m finally learning more and more to put the effort into the presentation of handmade gifts that I put into the gifts themselves – and for the first time in months I had the watercolours out. Little lemons on stiff paper, so minimalist and pleasing.

The dish towels did an admirable job of wrapping, and I loved the look of these stubby, bright cylinders in a row. It was hard to break up the set.

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I had so much fun embroidering these, looking at the black lines and trying to get my brain firing some creative neurons and imagining the possible colours. My mind is pretty literal and my ability to visualize is not strong. Turning black lines into colour and then picking the stitch that had the texture I wanted was playful and rewarding. I used a lot of split stitch, which is really the first time I’ve done anything with it. It’s a lovely, firm, well-behaved stitch.

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birds

butterfly

bee and flowers

rice bowl

(the little doodle beneath is from the flowers set from the same company)

owl
the blue around the eyes bled on this one so I made the butterfly for my friend and kept this for myself instead

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This was a really rewarding set of gifts to make. Each stitch had me thinking of colour, of texture, of the way these would transform something usually mundane into an act of experiencing colour and remembering friendship.

It is such a wonderful gift to the giver when the process is so full of emotion and anticipation, isn’t it?

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