Back to School

K2 1st Day of School Last Year

This whole week has been a flurry of preparation for going back to school. Not only do I have one kid in elementary and one in high school, I will be teaching two courses as well. So we are all getting ready. I love getting new school supplies for the kids as it reminds me of my own childhood. The only thing I really miss, besides the lower prices, is the clothes shopping. I grew up in Colorado, so going back to school meant getting new jeans and sweaters and any other typical fall clothing. Not so much here in Florida. It's still blazing hot with no sign of relief. The good news is that all the summer clothes are marked down for clearance and since we will be enjoying many more months of warm weather, that will probably make up most of our back to school shopping.

K2 has a really good backpack from last year, which she rarely used because she kept going back to her backpack from the year before. Sigh...alas, this is my life with this kid. I caved and let her get a new back pack this year with the incentive that she would get rid of the really old one and be able to swap between the new one and the not so used one. There weren't a lot of choices this year, but she did find one she deemed acceptable. I was worried that with the lack of choices there might many several kids with the same one, so I decided to personalize hers. I don't cross stitch as much as I used to because the patterns are so small that my eyes get tired. After spending all day at work on a computer, looking at tiny print is really hard on the eyes. Plus, my carpel tunnel flares up with the needlework. But, this was a fairly small project and too fun not to.

I used waste canvas to cross stitch her name onto the front of the bag. Waste canvas is pretty cool to use. After you cross stitch onto your fabric, you tear it out, which I'll show later. I've made the girls t-shirts with this as well.

I like to put a stabilizer on the back to keep the threads from slipping. Any fusible interfacing will work. 

Just pin both the waste canvas and the interfacing onto the fabric first to keep your project lined up.

What a coincidence that the Ray's game was on while working on this project. Ha! I had to giggle at the TV in the background.

After I finished the letters, I outlined them as well. The only drawback is that it's more difficult to pull the waste canvas out when you outline. Then I trimmed the interfacing close to the letters. No need to keep any of the extra on there.

I trimmed the canvas on the front as well. This way there is less threads to pull out.

Spraying the waste canvas with water breaks down the stiffeners in it and allows the canvas to be removed.

With a pair of tweezers, you can gently pull out the threads of the waste canvas.

All finished! Now she's ready to go back to school in style. Go Rays!