Spicy Goodness

Mmmm....Tabasco! Full of Spicy Goodness. I put on almost everything except my cereal.  I love the taste, I love the colour, the shape and size of the bottle and I love the branding. It's an iconic item that I can't live without.  To me, the Tabasco bottle is to the USA what the Vegemite jar is to Australia.  So what better to do than embroider it?! I started this months ago and just finished it. It began on a piece of gold velvet corduroy that was leftover from making a dog cushion for Mai-li. I didn't know what the final product would become and it turned out to be just the right size and thickness for a sunglasses case.

First, I traced the full-size image onto water-soluble stabiliser from an embroidery shop, with a water-soluble pen. This is the box from the big 12oz/355ml bottles I get at Costco (these last me about 6 months. The litle bottles only last a few weeks in my house!).

I used a couple of different colours of red and green, split stitch and stem stitch for most of it, and satin stitch to fill in the bigger letters. I free-handed the shadowing stitches on the bottle and label rather than tracing them.

My initial concern about loose stitches on the thick textured fabric was justified. You'll notice that the stitches in the diamond-shaped border came loose when I turned the fabric right-side-out after sewing the case together. I'll fix up those stitches at some point.  I was also using beeswax on the floss in the beginning and then switched to Thread Heaven.  The thread with beeswax (ie; the word 'TABASCO') is a bit dulled.  All in all, it was an experiment that I'm pretty happy with