I have been bitten by the machine embroidery bug, and February is National Embroidery Month. It is a good time to explore more ideas and projects to use this machine capability. Now that I have a good combination of stabilizers, the designs are coming out well. I still have the problem of some thread breakage, and seems to be worse on darker colors. Amazingly, my older Sulky rayon threads do not have as much of a problem with this as the newer Floriani threads. Quality products are hard to find these days. Anyway, on a recent newsletter from one of the online embroidery design companies, I found on an interesting idea. Their design was an ‘in the hoop’ applique that they stitched out and put on a runner with strips of fabric prints between the two appliqued ends. I wanted to use embroidery instead, so I chose a design and stitched out two of the same thing.

I changed a few of the colors to match up with the farmer’s market print I had for the center.

I tape off my ruler when squaring up a design to make it easier to center the design in the size I want. In this case, 8-1/2 inches.

I cut the right side and the top, then flip the piece around to do the other two sides.

In order to make both ends exactly the same, I stacked the embroideries, matching them up precisely by holding them up to a light. Then I trimmed the second one using the top one as a guide.

Now, to audition the fabrics for the middle. I’ll show you the progression of my thoughts, as I’ve had comments that readers like seeing my process. Here I have four prints – the farmer’s market one in the middle, then apples, tomatoes and onions. Cute, but the piece will end up over 40 inches long with borders, a bit too much.

I began piddling around, taking out a print, measuring again, seeing what I think. This is still too long.

Maybe I’ll use the apples instead of the tomatoes and onions.

How about none of the other prints? Nah, I wanted a bit more than this.

Adding the tomato print back hit the sweet spot. It gave me more color, picked up the tomatoes in the farmer’s market print and is a good size at 28 inches long (or thereabouts after the seams are sewn) before borders.

So I sewed those together, then started looking at the border. I only had 1/4 yard of the onion print, not enough for a border. So, the apples would do. The red in that print blended well with the other prints. But this looks too busy.

Adding a strip of white background on the sides to separate the border from the center calms the design.

So, I added both borders.

Loading it on the longarm, I used a backing with black in it.

The runner is quilted with leaves in white thread. I just quilted right over the embroidery.

Two passes and it was done. It took longer to load than it did to quilt.

On the back, the black background fabric has a gold fan print. I added the binding in the same fabric.

Turning that to the front, I finished it by machine. 

All done. The black on the binding picks up the black from the center print.

I am happy with how it turned out. The nice thing is that most of the time a centerpiece covers the center of a runner. With this piece, the embroidery will show on the ends.

If you’d like to do this project, the center block and embroidered blocks are 8-1/2-inches square. The tomato print is cut 2-1/2-inches by 8-1/2-inches. The white border on the sides is cut 2-inches x the measured length and added next. Then the apple print border was applied using the measure and cut method with 2-1/2-inch wide strips. The finished size is 15 x 31 inches.

This will go into the quilt show Quilt Shoppe in May. That is unless you want it – $35 plus shipping.

Do you like embroidery on a table runner? Do you think you might make something similar with your embroidery machine?

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Sulky has a 30-40% off sale on Polyester Threads and Stabilizers! It’s a great time to get what you need to embroider some table runners.

Milk Street is having a sale! Get 25% off your entire order when you spend $100 2/9 – 2/11 with the annual Special Sale with code SPEND100.

Check out Amazon’s President’s Day Sales from now until February 19.