About 5 years ago (2014?) I received the best gift ever! My mother-in-law bought me a new Ruby Deluxe Husqvarna Viking embroidery machine. Years prior my hubby bought me a Scandinavian 300 with a 4×4 embroidery hoop. It was enough to get me hooked! And so many of the projects I wanted to do couldn’t be done due to hoop constraints. And wow! When she offered to purchase this for me I was in tears. It felt like I had won a Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. And then when I got the machine home…oh wow, I was a kid in a candy store full of thread, needles, hoops, and lots of buttons to push!
We lived in a little town in the mountains with no easy access to material, but that didn’t stop me! I visited our nearby Target, saw a tablecloth that would do, and hooped that fabric up in no time!! Of course I was still a newbie and ended up choosing a very difficult fabric to sew on which ended up requiring several layers of stabilizer including water soluble stabilizer on the top. But I did it! And which design did I choose? A chinoiserie of course!
Before I even knew how to pronounce chinoiserie (sheen·waa·zr·ee) I was in love with the high contrast of blue and white, splashes of unexpected color and lots of ornate detail that left you wondering more about the story it portrayed.
To: Paula, the sweetest mother-in-law ever! Thank you for the BEST GIFT EVER! It’s definitely the gift that keeps on giving and giving…