Do you love classic children's books and summer reading club at the library? Then you'll love the new Wild Olive stitching club! It's a perfect way to stay home while still enjoying a good book and some needlecrafts.
The Summer Reading Stitching Club is a self-contained PDF pattern club that combines embroidery and English paper piecing, with a bit of sewing. It's suitable for beginners and fun for experienced stitchers too.
This project features 12 embroidery patterns representing classic children's books. You probably read most of them as a kid and will love reading them again now. In fact, you might want to revisit them for yourself or with your own kids!
Each pattern fits on a book cover, and that's where the English paper piecing (a hand-sewing technique) comes in. Along with the embroidered books, you'll also make extra pieces and everything will fit together to make a book bag. Instructions for English paper piecing and sewing the bag are included, though it's helpful to have some knowledge of embroidery and know how to use a sewing machine.
You will also receive a PDF stitch guide which you can print and fold to keep on hand!
If you can set aside a few hours a week for this, you'll have a hand-embroidered 12x18-inch tote bag in about the time it would take to do a library summer reading program. All while connecting with others in the club by using the club hashtag: #SummerReadingStitchingClub.
Note: All of the books represented in this stitching club are considered classics or modern classics, but a few contain views and character portrayals that are problematic at best. Rather than avoiding these titles completely, I see them as opportunities to think and talk about what makes these themes wrong then and now, where the beliefs still exist, and how we can do better going forward.
The books are:
Wind in the Willows
Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry
Alice in Wonderland
Little House on the Prairie
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Winnie the Pooh
All of a Kind Family
The Secret Garden
Charlotte's Web
The Wizard of Oz
The Borrowers
Peter Pan
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You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to use these pattern files. The software can be downloaded for free at http://www.adobe.com/products/reader/
These patterns are for your personal and cottage-industry use only. Please do not redistribute the files. Thank you.