Stitchboard Admin message #2
Re: new project in the works.....
March 9, 2014 at 8:28:18 PM  (in response to paddy message #1)
 
Pat,

Hi, and welcome! 

I have made something for towels in the past...not a monogram, though.  I (sort of) designed and stitched a couple's name onto special cross stitch fingertip towels (that had an aida insert) for a wedding gift.    It's in the photo albums here:
/circles/pg/photos/view/3314/carl-amp-diana
(The picture in the photo albums is not from an actual towel, so it looks way better than the real thing did, IMO.  The aida cloth portion of the fingertip towels was very thin and flimsy, and though the finished product looked fine - from the front, anyway - it was not as nice as the plain old aida cloth in the picture.)

This design is from a fairly long time ago.  From what I recall, I used an alphabet book that I'd purchased, so I put the elements together on the computer first, in a rudimentary program that didn't handle a lot of the back stitch, then printed it out, added what was needed by hand, and stitched the towels from the amended charts.  I don't remember if I designed the hearts-behind-the-ampersand thing...it's way too long ago and I lost all of my cross stitch books in a flood, so I have no way to say which book the letters even came from, let alone being able to see if I designed the heart design or if it was from a book. 

Just a thought...how about using some free alphabets that are available online to help with your monogram design?    Here's one link I found with a whole bunch to start with (if these don't work out for what you have in mind, undoubtedly there are others ):
http://www.better-cross-stitch-patterns.com/cross-stitch-alphabet-patterns.html

Hope that helps! 

Meanwhile, I love your idea for sewing the fabric to the towel.  At the time, I had bought special fingertip towels, and to be honest, they really left a lot to be desired.    My ends still showed, for one thing, as there was no backing for the cross stitched section of the towels.    And though you technically could use waste canvas to stitch the monograms on, your ends would still show on the backs of the towels that way.    I think the idea of a little canvas on the towels could be accomplished very nicely and look far better than stitching with waste canvas ever could!    What a brilliant idea it is to sew the finished pieces onto the towels...LOL, where were you back around 1995, and can you please travel back in time and tell me to do that?!    Seriously, how much nicer would the entire presentation have been if there had been a choice of towel colors and sizes (instead of white and fingertip only), and the design could have been stitched comfortably onto aida or linen?!  Wow!

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mdory message #3
Re: new project in the works.....
June 15, 2014 at 1:56:28 PM  (in response to paddy message #1)
 
A really good way to make custom monograms is using Microsoft Word.  I designed some monograms for my wedding that way. I used this tutorial and they turned out pretty nice:
 http://www.projectwedding.com/ideas/26856/diy-wedding-challenge-how-to-design-your-own-monogram-in-microsoft-word

You can find tons of free pretty fonts that are licensed for personal use. I would find one you like and design your monogram, then save the image as a .jpg or .png and run it through the graph maker here.  Good luck! 

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Stitchboard Admin message #4
Re: new project in the works.....
June 15, 2014 at 11:33:30 PM  (in response to mdory message #3)
 
Oooh, thank you for sharing the link...that's such an excellent tutorial!  Love the idea of doing that, and there are zillions of completely free fonts out there which would be useful for such a project!  I can think of a few applications where monograms would turn out very handy. 

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