Embroidery Show & Tell + Questions for Ya

So I just finished my first embroidery piece using a Sublime Stitching pattern - yay! I am so happy with how it turned out. I really enjoyed working with this pattern and saw it as a fun design challenge. I taught myself a couple of new stitches from The Embroidery Stitch Bible (a must-have reference book if you like embroidery!) and geeked out at the craft store picking out tons of new embroidery floss in beautiful colors.

The pattern I used is from the lovely Roaring Twenties set if you'd like to get it for yourself. It's super-cute! These stitched examples here are from Sublime Stitching.

What I love about these brilliant patterns is how easy they are to customize. They're just a guideline for the picture, but the colors & variety of stitches used are totally up to you. You could give a group of people the same pattern to work with & each one would come up with a different, equally awesome, finished piece. Compare & contrast my flapper girl with the one at left - quite different! They've added a beauty mark; I've added eyebrows & fill-in stitches to the feather. We've used very different color palettes, and I used a paisley fabric scrap that I happened to have hanging around.

Being a beginner at the whole embroidery thing though, I have a few questions for other stitchers out there:

How do you get rid of the hoop marks? Is there a trick to removing those? Or is it just a hazard of using thin fabric?

I steam ironed the bejeezus out of this fabric before framing it up, but the creases from the hoop are still faintly visible in the corners.

What's your favorite method for displaying your work? Do you typically frame a piece like this? Or do you just leave it in the hoop (eliminating the need to remove the hoop marks)?

I have seen this great Purl Bee tutorial for finishing a hoop piece, but haven't tried it yet. I'd love to learn more from those of you who've been embroidering for a while - please share your tips & tricks!

Craftrepreneurs: Rosalie Gale, Tara Gentile & Megan Auman

 I've come across some very cool, helpful resources for indie craft biz owners recently & wanted to share. I am simply in awe of the brilliant ladies behind these organizations. Hope you find them as interesting & inspiring as I have! ~Beth H   {re-posted from Get Crafty, Austin}

First up is Rosalie Gale, founder of Unanimous Craft, a tagable, sortable index of resources for crafters, artists and indie business owners. Rosalie says,

"I was inspired to build Unanimous Craft after seeing a huge list of links to different resources that The House of Mouse posted in the Etsy forums. I wanted to make a tool that our community could use to get organized and share information.

It's sort of like Yelp for the crafty community. People can submit resources (great articles on Twitter, awesome magazines, online tools, accounting spreadsheets, inspirational blogs - whatever) and the community votes on the usefulness of each listing. Then, people can curate lists of resources that fall into a common theme like: 10 things you should do when you start your indie business, 500 ways to deal with Twitter, etc."

Pretty awesome, no? Rosalie recently added The WonderCraft to the index - check it out! We are honored! And we'd totally love it if you visited our listing & rated us, so that we might place high in the Popularity Contest. : )

Next up is Tara Gentile of Scoutie Girl fame. Tara has long been an involved & highly respected member of the crafting community through her work as the editor & head writer behind Scoutie Girl, "the blog with a penchant for the passionately handmade."

Now she's taking it up a notch with the launch of her awesome new Big Thinking for Small Businesses blog & a "big thinking" consulting biz. The gist of it:

"We specialize in web strategy, branding, product development, community building, and marketing to help build your small biz empire. Specifically, I work with creative entrepreneurs: those interested in building their businesses by breaking down convention and finding customers who think outside-the-box too.

To help you reach your goals, I have a wide range of products & services. Here you will find self-paced products, a la carte services, and full-fledged invasion packages to suit your needs no matter what stage your empire is in. I only ask that if you decide to work with me or buy my product, you are committed to your own success – regardless of fear, opposition, and self-doubt – as I am."

Sounds amazing; Tara really knows how to cut right to the heart of the matter for small biz owners. I've been very inspired by her writing on her blogs & just bought her "52 Weeks of Blogging Your Passion" e-book! I'm looking forward to getting re-energized about my creative work & revamping my own blog with Tara's wonderful advice.

And last, but certainly not least, Megan Auman, the genius behind Crafting an MBA. Her blog is filled with tons of great information & business advice for designers & makers. It runs the gamut from practical posts on making & manufacturing to extremely thought-provoking discussions on product development & growing your business. The blog covers everything in between & above & beyond these topics, too - it is a wealth of great information! 

You can even take part in the Crafting an MBA book club! Megan says, 

"One of my goals when starting this website was to create a community where designers and makers could come together and discuss business related books and concepts. Its partly selfish – I always find myself wanting to discuss what I’m reading with others. But I also want to help others read business books and figure out [how] to apply those principals to their own craft-based businesses."

I hope you'll check out these ladies' websites - they're all very engaging reads that inspire deep thinking about our field & offer many amazing resources for growing a small business.