Valentine Cheer

Don’t do a massive overhaul of the home or tablescaping for each holiday, but I do enjoy a few perky little elements sprinkled here and there. The embroidery machine (Husqvarna Viking Topaz) let’s me accomplish this so simply. As I’ve mentioned in a few other posts, the easiest way is to pick up white hand towels and match your thread to the other colors of the bath, scout and add a border to the smaller microfiber towels or find kitchen towels to meet your needs – my previous posts list favored suppliers and resources.

For my own kitchen, I found Ikea towels and was able to match the threads to them exactly. All of the designs except the teddy bear are Embroidery Libraryand named at the bottom of this post. 

I edit the colors, sizes and overlap in 4D Embroidery Extra. This program defaults to “remove overlap” which works well if you’re stacking hearts, like the towels I gifted above, or solid areas of overlap. However, I learned with the teddy bears below that you want to shut “remove overlap” off if you are placing lettering on top of a design. It creates oodles of stops, starts and jump stitches and it does not look as solid and smooth as if the wording were placed on top of a solid design. The towel on the right below is my edited version where I didn’t stop the program from “removing overlap” when I added the “I’m Yours” so I could have a matching set.  Also, some vendors do not put a code (say Urban Threads has UT as part of a design name when you download it). This means after a year or more of collecting designs – unless you’re smart enough to note it when you first download – you’ll have no idea where a design came from. The teddy bear is one of those designs for me. Now I always add a few letters to the filename so I know where the design is from. If someone emails me or I find the vendor – I’ll update this post to note it who sells the teddy bear.

The kitchen towels below are mostly my editing program and fonts. The heart outlines are from the Hearts and Ribbon Bridal Border. I love the touch large rik rak brings to kitchen towels and mentioned my favorite ebay supplier of it in one of my earlier linked posts. Personalizing the towel just brings that extra glimmer of fun to gifts.

I’ve also mentioned Napkins Online in many posts. If you machine or hand embroider or simply decorate with appliqué and trims – they have great napkins to start with. The Simply Sweathearts design was used “as is” – no editing as it was perfect for the application

The designs for Embroidery Library are Be Mine Heart, Cutie Pie Heart,  Kiss Me Heart, XOXO (Hugs and Kisses) Heart , I’m Yours Heart, Hearts-a-Plenty,  Simply Sweethearts, Hearts and Ribbon Bridal Border.