3 Good Dogs (and an Ornery Cat) I’ve Stitched This Week [Brown Paper Stitch Dispatch]

This article is brought to you by Brown Paper Stitch, my business that makes your wardrobe pawesome by embroidering your pets on clothing.

Over the past cou­ple of weeks, I haven’t had a lot to show in my stu­dio. But that does­n’t mean I haven’t been work­ing! I have many pet por­trait patch­es and shirts that are on deck, so I’ve been cre­at­ing the sketch­es for all those projects.

I typ­i­cal­ly don’t share those sketch­es unless it’s via a reel or pic­tured with the embroi­dery itself. While impor­tant, sketch­es aren’t as excit­ing as see­ing the stitch­es, and it’s also a way to pro­tect my intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty; I’ve had folks trace over my cus­tom sketch­es and recre­ate the embroi­deries for themselves (!).

Scroll down to see what I’ve been stitch­ing in my stu­dio late­ly. To see what I’m doing in real-time, fol­low me on Insta­gram!

Sweater Pup on a Sweater

I sound like a bro­ken record, but one big rea­son I love to take on cus­tom work is that your ideas help to push my embroi­dery in new direc­tions. This can be seen in one of my lat­est com­plet­ed projects, Coop­er the pup. When the client sent me a sweater, I was a bit befud­dled about how I am going to stitch Coop­er’s por­trait onto it. After all, the col­lar was­n’t like the typ­i­cal col­lared shirt. After going back and forth with sketch­es and place­ment, the client and I land­ed on putting the dog on the chest with his name nearby.

Embroi­der­ing on a knit is noth­ing like the cham­bray that I usu­al­ly work on. This par­tic­u­lar sweater was also pret­ty loose and direct­ly stitch­ing on it—with all the details I like to include—just was­n’t an option. So, I decid­ed to first embroi­der Coop­er on felt and then once done, adhered him to the gar­ment with a sta­bi­liz­er. I then stitched around his edges to fur­ther secure the embroidery.

The name was done com­plete­ly free­hand on the col­lar, which lent itself to direct stitch­ing since the knit was tighter and chunkier.

All in all, I’m real­ly pleased with how the sweater turned out!

Pup Patches in the Works

I’m now stitch­ing a trio of pup patch­es. I have a client who ordered three patch­es of the same dog and so I’m stitch­ing him in three dif­fer­ent ways. It’s a great excuse to bust out my 10-inch hoop (that I’ve nev­er used before) and embroi­der all of the patch­es there.

1 Year of Stitches: January is Done!

Jan­u­ary 31

I start­ed my 1 Year of Stitch­es projects off with a detailed por­trait of my par­en­t’s late Gold­en Retriev­er, Mad­die. (Refresh­er: I am stitch­ing a dif­fer­ent ani­mal por­trait each month for a year. I’m call­ing it my #crea­ture­coat.) Dur­ing the first week of Jan­u­ary, I had a lot of time to stitch Mad­die. This proved cru­cial, as the design was com­plex and I was able to make a lot of progress. As the month went on, I had less time and end­ed up fin­ish­ing Mad­die on the evening of the 31st.

Feb­ru­ary 2

Now, I’m on to my Feb­ru­ary por­trait: my beloved Pauline. She’s not quite as detailed as Mad­die was (here’s a peek at the sketch), which is prob­a­bly a good thing—especially with Feb­ru­ary being a short month!

You can start 1 Year of Stitch­es any time of the year! Check out the details and sign up for my mail­ing list about the project below.

Want to start your own 1 Year of Stitches project? Sign up below for emails helping you get started.