Silk Embroidered Heart Sachet & Smocked Hangar Cover Finished

This is the first of the prescheduled posts for the next 1 1/2 weeks while we are vacationing in London.

I finished both of these projects a few weeks ago, but finally got around to mailing them off to my cousin as a thank you gift for hosting me during my visit to Detroit in February. I didn't want to post about them just in case she happened to read my blog. The Smocked Hanger cover is made of some silk dupioni scraps I just happened to have around, and smocked with au ver a Soie, soie d'alger floss in two shades of dusty rose, 4621 and 4622. The pattern is from an old Inspirations magazine, issue 41, which is out of print and not available on eBay or anywhere else I looked. The hook is covered with silk ribbon, not the embroidery kind, that is folded in half the short way and basted down each side to gather. The instructions call for hand basting, but this made the sides gap out too much, so I rebasted using a long basting stitch on the machine. This worked perfectly. The hook goes through a little buttonhole in the smocking, which you can see by looking at the link to the previous post above.

The heart sachet doesn't look nearly as nice, I think. The heart shapes are a bit wobbly, but all in all, not too awfully bad. I made the backing and bias strips from some rose dupioni scraps, and embroidered all around the outer edge in a coral stitch. The strap is a bias strip I made by cutting the fabric on the bias, then running it through one of those Clover Bias Tube makers, then folding in have and stitching down one side.

The lavender came from my backyard plants, only two of which survived our wet winter. I found out the hard way that lavender likes well drained soil. I purchased the empty teabag online somewhere, and they seal nicely with a hot iron.

I hope she likes it!

Please feel free to comment on any of the posts while I'm in London. I will have Wi Fi connectivity on my iPhone, and will publish comments from it. Actually, that's what I generally do anyway, so I can publish from work without bringing up Blogger on my laptop. See you in April!