I hope you all had a wonderful mother's day. My mother was visiting this weekend, and it was wonderful. We had absolutely gorgeous weather yesterday for the Sheep and Wool Festival (more on that soon) and a fabulous day today walking around DC.
I always have a lot of trouble containing my enthusiasm about gifts, so naturally as soon as I picked my mom up at the airport on Friday, I was bursting with excitement. This morning, I finally got to give it to her. Here it is:

I'd wanted to do something with these lovely black and white portrait photos of my mother and my grandmother for a while, but the project really came together when I happened upon this George Eliot quote:

The photos themselves are very old fashioned looking, and I wanted the whole project to have that feel, so I used muslin -- a type of unbleached cotton with natural variegation -- for the background. I transferred the photos to the fabric using Print 'n Press paper. All you do is scan the pictures, flip the image 180 degrees (you want the mirror image of the photo), and then iron them onto the fabric. I was really pleased with the picture quality.
I did the same thing with the quote, but I ironed it onto the back (if you do this, you don't have to flip it 180 degrees) and then embroidered through it.
The only downside to this method is that you can't iron the fabric again after you've tranferred the images, so it's a bit wrinkled. In an ideal world, you might embroider first and then put the pictures on last to avoid wrinkles, but it's way too easy to make a mistake ironing the pictures on, and then all that embroidery would go to waste -- yikes! I tried ironing it with a towel over it to protect it, but to no avail. If I made something like this again, I would be very careful not to wrinkle the fabric while embroidering, and I would press it flat with a book when I wasn't working on it. I might also try stretching the cotton on a frame like a canvas to help get out the wrinkles.

Still, there's nothing more dear than the faces of people we love, so I can't help but love it, wrinkles and all.