Embroidering preserve jar covers with the Brother Luminaire XP

Yesterday I made the sweetest little faux-hand-stitched pillow on the Brother Luminaire XP. I was pleased to discover the Duplicate and Alignment features – they ensured that my cottagecore cross stitched pillow was exactly as I envisioned.

The Brother Luminaire XP

I’m glad to have you back today as I have something in mind that will make your pantry picture-perfect. Or… add an extra-personalized touch to gifting homemade preserves. I also promised stash-busting, and this project only takes a 5” or 6” square of fabric! By the way, did you try making the faux hand embroidered cushion cover I showed you yesterday?

Making your own preserves is such a cottagecore activity, especially if you grow your own fruits or have a fun pick-your-own outing to gather fresh ingredients. Embroidering some jar skirts is a cute idea for gifting homemade canned goods, or even just having some decorated jars for yourself.

TIP You can also use them to decorate hobby jars that store crafts or collections. Go nuts!

For myself, I’m making a jar cover for some locally produced wildflower honey. My family loves honey and likes to support the local beekeepers, so when they buy honey, they buy honey—in humongous 2L pails. Instead of going out and buying grocery store honey at University, I think I can be environmentally conscious and locally source my honey from my parent’s pantry (haha!) using my own canning jar.

Naturally, bees and flowers are the perfect choice to decorate my topper. I’m using three designs from the Luminaire’s built-in library. To start, I brought in a circle shape to represent my design area. Having a circle means I can more easily gauge how much space I can take up when making my scene. I measured my jar lid and allowed for ¼” border, so I sized my circle to 2¼” (ish). Lucky for me the built-in bees and flower I picked are tiny, so I won’t need to squeeze them into my circle!

Then I brought in my bee, duplicated it (love that tool!), and thought about how they’d look arranged in different ways. I finally settled on having them circle the same flower, and brought a ‘Z’ with a tiny pink flower in it to play with, too.

Bringing in my designs

I used my color palette tool to change the flower to purple, since bees are most attracted to blue and purple flowers. Did you know that different flower colors attract different pollinators?

And, since it’s just a little design, I used the magnifier to get in close to see the detail. Go big or go home, right? Another thing, I want the bees to face each other over the flower, so I used the mirror function to flip one of them. The mirror function looks like two triangles mirroring each other.

Try out the mirror tool yourself!

The rest is just rotating and moving the flower (ignore the letter) and bees into just the perfect position. We’ve played with those tools a lot already! But you may be wondering why I picked the letter to use. My reasoning is simple, if a little obscure… I loved the flower, and couldn’t find another flower that I wanted to use. So I’m gonna cheat a little and skip over the gold ‘Z’ and just stitch out the flower and bees. I’ll show you how when I get there, but I have a couple of things to do yet.

First, I’ll delete the circle because it’s not really part of my design and I no longer need it, and then, here’s the important part. Remember I brought the fancy ‘Z’ in last? Well, that’s when it will stitch, last. But I actually need it to stitch first because I overlapped the bees on top of it! So… by touching the Sequence button on the bottom of the Edit menu, I can change my design order!

Sequencing is yet another customization option!

Ok – I think we’re ready to stitch! I stabilized and hooped a piece of muslin, and moved on to the Embroidery screen. You can see in my pic below that the gold letter is first, and I want to skip the gold. Skipping parts of your design or going back to them after your design is stitched out is incredibly simple – just press the +/- needle button on the bottom of the screen, and you can pinpoint exactly where you need to ‘bee’ (see what I did there?) on your project. In this case I just touched the down-arrow under the color display to start with the second color.

Stitch navigation to skip past a color

I then stitched my design out. It didn’t matter that the arrangement overlapped and added bulk in some spots; the Luminaire embroidered the layers with ease, and I really like the dimensional effect that that little bit of layering gave.

After trimming away my stabilizer, I used pinking shears to cut out a 5” circle to top my canning jar, and held it in place with the ring. How cute is this?

And now my two little bees are guarding my honey jar!

So there you go! Now I have a pretty little jar skirt to put on my tea tray honey jar. Did you make one along with me? I can see this being cute as a holiday gift too if you filled the jar with cookies (cookie mix?), hot cocoa mix, or other goodies and, of course, embroidered with a seasonal theme. There are so many ways to play with this idea and I’d love to see yours, so be sure when you post it that you tag QUILTsocial if you make one for yourself! It’s a great way to play with the little designs on your Luminaire! Be sure to join me again tomorrow, where I’ll be making another sweet (or…. sour?) project on the Brother Luminaire XP! It’s super-simple, and I can’t wait to hang it in my kitchen!

This is part 2 of 5 in this series

Go back to part 1: Making a faux hand embroidered cushion cover with the Brother Luminaire XP

Go to part 3: Customizing a cottagecore tea towel with decorative embroidery

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