What a guy!

Appliqued Music Journal

George is part of a production of 'Guys and Dolls' this week.  It is a school performance and they're famous for the fabulous quality of their shows.  It's been a very demanding rehearsal schedule, with after school sessions for the last year, as well as all day Sunday for the past three weeks.  Now if this sounds a lot for the children, just think what it must be like for the teachers - No wonder they only put on a show once every three years!   We therefore really wanted to show our appreciation to the main staff involved and so I've been stitching a couple of personalised journals.  

Our children attend a Catholic school and as we also go to Mass in the same parish there is an overlap between school, home and church.  We are blessed with a beautiful church family, they have teachers who are their god-parents and we've shared so many holidays and wonderful times together in a large group since they were babies.  The upshot of this is that I was not reliant on George attempting to describe what the Head of Music looked like for this journal cover.  However, I'm still not actually convinced that I have captured Mr GB's likeness as, whilst he is perhaps a 'little thinning' on top, in real life he has quite a boyish charm going on!  Just think Matthew, you only have to wait ten or fifteen years before you grow into your journal cover!

The design was hand-drawn and all the pieces individually cut before being attached to the main fabric with fusible web.  I then used a pencil to gently mark the facial features before 'free-style' machine stitching the whole design with black thread.

  

The design was completed with the recipient's name and a very obvious pun based on the name of the show!

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The second gift was a little more difficult as it was for a teacher I haven't yet met, so I therefore decided against attempting another likeness and instead stitched a cute teacher owl.  

The multi-coloured fabric was cut from a little girl's dress by British designer Jasper Conran. It was a car-boot sale buy last weekend and was just 50p, it's also going to be perfect for Easter egg appliques.  The dress featured a very full skirt so offered up yards of gorgeous material.

The little shape you can see in the top right corner is a matching mirror compact.  I was sewing late into the night to get this second journal finished so the photos were taken in very poor light, the colours and weave look much nicer in real life - Honest!