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.
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.
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
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.
