Needles and a Pen » Knitting, Sewing, and Nursing School

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  • Welcome to my blog!

    Hi! I'm Traci. I'm a Registered Nurse who loves quilting, knitting, cross stitch, and the great outdoors. In my pre-scrubs life, I owned Real Photography, and you can still see my old wedding and portrait photography site here .

    I've created a map that shows links to our camping/hiking/general family fun review posts that you can find here. It's pretty much the coolest thing on this site. Thanks, Google!

    I great big puffy heart *love* comments, so please let me know you visited! I try to always reply!

a modern nativity

Too early for Christmas projects?  Nah.

Last night there was a discussion on flickr that got me motivated to stay up and make this little Christmas mug rug.  It feels like there’s a lot of outdated religious craft projects out there and not very many simple modern ones.  I wanted to challenge myself to create a sweet modern minimalist nativity scene using free motion machine stitching for the applique.

Things I love about this: the colors, the North Star, and the overall design.  Things I’d do differently: make the cradle a little shorter, get better at free motion machine stitching so that I could write ‘silent night, holy night’ in script on it, and figure out a way to do the hay better.  But overall I hope this inspires people to take another look at the religious imagery of Christmas and not be scared to approach it in a modern way.

kelly o. - I love it!!

tasha - hi! thanks for stopping by my blog…..yours is so great too! i love your photography and all your projects are wonderful! and what little cuties you have! i SO need to make some mug rugs as well. i’ve dreamt about it a few times and stared at fabric combinations, but haven’t gotten to it yet. they are super cute to look at! i love your nativity one. so sweet. 😉

have a fabulous week!

Mom - This is amazing–simply beautiful. You are an artist!

Kate - Beautiful colors in this. I came across your blog today, it’s lovely!

Emily - Oh I love that nativity mug rug. Very tasteful! 🙂

Fiona Leontis/Patchworkdelights - Ok so I think this is even cuter than the owl mug rug!! Beautiful!

Kelly O. - how did you do this? quilt it first then add the applique?
quilt after the applique?