Hoop Up 2 swap

Hi all. I thought I'd share a project that I worked on during my hiatus from blog land over the holidays.

While scanning my Twitter last summer I found out that John (Quilt Dad) was going to have a "Hoop Up 2" embroidery swap. I thought the swap would be a fun way to make some new embroideries and meet some new peeps so I signed up. The way the swap worked was everyone would be placed into a group of about 5 people. Each person in the group comes up with their own theme for an embroidery. After everyone shares their theme, each person has to stitch an embroidery for every other swap partner in their group based on that partner's theme.

The theme that I chose was "Pretty Pets in Pretty Borders". I made a sample of my theme to share with the others in my group. You can see my process of the sample piece for my theme here and here. Above are pics of the embroideries I did based on my partner's themes. The "Owl in Laurel" is for John's (Quilt Dad) "whimsical woodland" theme. Lim's Cafe is for Amy's (badskirt) "retro or silly sign" theme. The Etch-a-Sketch is for Jill's (spinster sister) "Text + ?" theme, where Jill wanted us to have text plus something else in our embroideries. And the final piece is for Cara's (quiltnookgal) "Bluebirds with Tea" theme. I had such a good time stitching everyone's piece and it was a fun challenge to work within someone else's theme. Once I receive all my "Pretty Pets in Pretty Borders" from my group partners, I'll be sure to take some pics and share them. I'm so excited to see how they all turned out!

Another exciting thing about the swap was that it allowed me to develop my iron-on transfer Puppy embroidery patterns. I love when work and play collide!