Sorry for being a bit MIA the past week. I would say we have been busy and what not but really we haven’t, we’ve just been lazy bums. Sometimes all I want to do when I get home from work is sit my bum on the couch and watch TV and eat cookies and drink tea. While that is all fine and dandy, we do enjoy this blog and are trying to make some fun things to share with you all (whilst balancing work and those occasional lazy days we all need).

Today we have one of said fun things to share with you. We have created embroidered cork board leaf coasters! They are super cute and a lot of fun to make! Plus, they are perfect for your Thanksgiving table or just out and about for an extra seasonal flare.

At first, we knew we wanted to be able to embroider different patterns on the leaves but didn’t know how we could go about doing this. That is when the lovely cork board came to mind. It is perfect because not only does it already look sort of leaf colored but you can also easily embroider into it to make any design your heart desires.

We printed out basic leaf stencils from the interweb and then Rose stenciled them onto the cork board and cut them out using an exacto knife. This was a bit more of a delicate process than one would think, so be careful with your cuts. Cork board tends to rip and break off, and you wouldn’t want your acorn to lose its stem now would you? As you can see some of our poor acorns heads got a bit chopped off. But, ya know, nature ain’t perfect!

Finally once we cut out all the leafs and acorns our hearts desired, we began to embroider. For this, we took embroidery thread and took only 4 of the strands of it. We found that using all the strands was too thick for the cork and made bigger holes in it than we wanted. We used a regular needle for embroidery and just remembered to knot the thread before we started. Again, be careful at this step because the cork can break easily. If you have to undo a stitch, just be careful pulling it back out that you don’t break anything. We played around with different patterns and styles on all of the different leafs. We also chose fun bright colors so you would really be able to see the string.

This craft was a lot of fun to do! I’m not much of an embroiderer but I didn’t let that stop me from trying. You can do simple stripes across (like with our acorn) or simple stitches outlining the leaf. Or, get more fancy if you are a true embroiderer and make some funky designs! We would love to see what you guys comes up with!