I am off to Richmond, VA and then to Philadelphia, PA today. I am going to the Buyers Market of American Craft to shop for new stuff for the store. I packed up a couple of sewing projects and my traveling art kit to take with me.

 This is my art kit. It includes watercolor crayons, ink pencils, colored markers, black markers, a pen, double sided tape, glue, pencil sharpener and a water brush. I just noticed that my pencil isn’t in there. I better go put that in! It all fits in the magenta zipper bag.

 Then I take my studio journal and I have some photos of plants and flowers that I will make sketches of as I have free time. I might only get a couple done but it’s good to have photos of something to draw in case you don’t feel like drawing airports.

And my stitch projects go in zip lock bags with my needle case, small scissors and the threads that go with that specific project. I will be finishing the applique I showed you yesterday. The blue/green bag is an ongoing Kantha stitch project that I have been periodically stitching while traveling. It is a very slow work in progress. I have never had a problem taking my needles and small scissors on the airplane through security. Hopefully that won’t change.

I stitched the applique center portions today. I was going to cut the edges but decided I should wait until I got home and use my rotary cutter. I’m just going to cut straight along the edges and make the edges even.

 If you enlarge the photo you can probably see the stitching. The entire time I was stitching this, I kept seeing the blue negative shapes from the original design.

I finished the stitching on my two Valentine’s Day cards. Now I just have to fuse them down to the card stock and write something “sweet” inside.

 I think I’m going to use this one, although with the stitching, I like them both.

Here’s an extra one. Perhaps I can just use this one for next Valentine’s Day.

Here’s my next stitching project. I made the yellow felt piece yesterday and fused the blue cut piece down to it this morning. Now I need to stitch it down. I will trim the outside edge once I stitch the middle section down. The right side edge is really thin and I thought it would be better to stitch and make it secure before I cut around the edge.

It’s getting close to Valentine’s Day and I usually make a card for my sweetie. He would be disappointed if I bought him one now. So I thought I would make a shadow applique to put on the card.

 This was my original design. I already had this fabric with fusible on the back. So I just cut it out, found a background and fused it down.

 I ended up cutting the applique pieces with a craft knife so I had two appliques. I think I like this one better.

I then covered them with silk organza. Now to stitch them down and attach them to a card. I’ll do the stitching this week and I’ll show you the result soon.