Craft basket wednesday...

Insane, I know..but yes, I do have an entry for craft basket wednesday, two weeks after giving birth. The reason that I have this entry is ehm... procrastination and foolishness?

You see, for Michael's baptism we needed a baptismal cloth, a 'symbolic garment of white' that you put over the baby at a certain point during baptism, over his baptismal clothes. For Joseph we bought one months and months in advance in Saint Louis when we visited my in laws.
For Michael it was one of those last minute things. Then we found out that the local Catholic store didn't carry them (it's a tiny store), and I didn't like the price of the ones we found online.
So I decided I could just 'make one myself'. Never mind that I just had a C section, was still recovering and was expecting 28 people over for the baptism.
I got my sewing machine back, repaired from the store where it had been since before Michael's birth and Michael's godmother drove me to Joann's to select white fabric.

So far so good. Even cutting and hemming it worked out pretty well. After all, those things I had done before. I had my mother draw a simple cross on the fabric with a tailors penncil.. and then I did something foolish. Seeing that there were many pretty stitches on the sewing machine, I experimented a few lines with several of them, chose a star shaped stitch and decided to machine embroider the cross instead of doing it by hand. It would only take a few minutes that way... right?
Except I had not taken into account that with the pressure foot, you couldn't really see the line you were following, or the stitches before you. Going straight down etc was not that much of a problem, but when it came to the corners... oh boy!
Then of course some things went wrong, I had to rewind the bobbin, etc. etc. Needless to say it was not a great sight.
In the end I spend several hours following my machine embroidery effort filling the cross up with hand embroidered stitches to try and rectify the shape. The day of the baptism I spend another hour and a half hand embroidering white stars on a white cloth to make the cross look pretty. In the end it looked different from the designed cross but rather nice anyhow, more like a tau cross.