A Bib for a Baby Boy

Today's post is about a very simple form of embroidery that is especially suited for baby items on fairly sheer fabrics. I mentioned in an earlier post that I was making a bib for a friend to bring to a baby shower. Here is the finished giraffe, nicely shadowed within the outline.

As I mentioned before this is a closed herringbone stitch, which can be worked either from the front or the back of the right side of the fabric. I prefer working it from the right side so I can better place the stitches. The front outline looks just like a back stitch. I worked all the inside markings first, and as the giraffe is all one color it's pretty easy. Speaking of color, I actually agonized over which to use. I looked at cartoon images, and worried about how to get the light tan and dark tan of real giraffes into the embroidery. Finally I gave up and just picked this one color, DMC 3853. After all, it's a baby bib! It doesn't need to be realistic.

Shadow work doesn't just have to be for babies. This is a name tag we made during our SAGA chapter's meeting as the program offering. Our local chapter, well one of them anyway as I belong to two, goes by the name of Sandcastle and we all have these cute name tags now to wear in our convention badge holders.  If you click on this link and go all the way to the bottom of the page, you'll see a another link to download the pattern for the badge holder. If you look closely right under the top of the castle, you'll see the transition between the pink and the orange colors. We stitched the orange first, then the two sides and the middle part of the pink so as not to mix the pink and orange on the back of the piece. With the flag we stitched the "Sandcastle" first in back stitch using green, then the blue shadow work for the body of the flag. We also had some darling seashell fabric for the badge holder, but I had already made one as you can see in this post.

Final shot of the bib before it goes to a new mom for her darling little boy.  This was constructed using a pattern I had made myself, and has a layer of batting in the middle to soak up drool, milk, water, juice and whatever else a baby can throw at it. As I mentioned in the previous post, this is made of polycotton and can be tossed into the wash. No special handling instructions or ironing required.

PS. I have another bit of shadow work in the Toile Eyelet Dress I posted on in June of 2010. The little bluebirds on the overlay are done in shadow work. I didn't label it as such and didn't even mention it in the post, but I will add the label just in case anyone wants to refer to it.