Embroideries for my Nephew

Personal projects are important for the soul. There's something about creating a gift for someone you love or for your own home that has a magical quality to it. I find it's these projects that inspire brilliant new ideas.

Last year I had the absolute honour of becoming 'Aunty Moll' as my twin sister gave birth to the most beautiful baby boy. As an aunty with no other responsibilities and an embroidery degree, I leapt straight into my pile of fabrics and threads to make this little lad something special.

I haven't made anything for a baby before and I enjoyed the challenge of keeping everything nice and simple. I put a huge amount of pressure on myself to make a good first impression - not that he even knows what an embroidery is yet...

Knowing that baby's room was soft neutral colours with a jungle theme, I started to embroider a tiger. I chose the terracotta red/orange colour based on the bridesmaid dresses we wore at my sister's wedding the year before. With a bit of time and material left over, I made the zebra embroidery too.

Both of these designs were made by stretching material into an embroidery hoop and using a sewing machine to free hand embroider the background colours, the stripes and details were added by hand later.

I took these projects to my fortnightly sewing club over a few months, I find social stitching is the best way to achieve accountability with projects like these, especially if there's a deadline looming.

As the designs were finished, I pressed them and put them into frames for my sister and brother-in-law to unwrap. Baby is quickly approaching a year old now and I'd like to set about making him a new embroidery - perhaps some little felt vegetables to play with.