Cross Stitched Linen bread bags for March

 

The March embroidery club project and designs are up and ready for download, click here to get to the download page. The project is a pretty bread bag embellished with cross stitch embroidery and a “vintage look” lace edging.

Every Easter my mom makes beautiful braided egg bread. This is a tradition for us that goes back for generations. While the bread is still warm, she carefully wraps each loaf in a linen tea towel to keep the crust from ruining. And then the best part, she gives us a loaf. It's golden yellow, fluffy and lightly sweet, in one word it's yummy. So yummy in fact that it inspired this pretty bread bag. This year I plan to give her a few of these so that she can give them away with her beautiful bread.

Now it occurred to me that not everyone makes their own bread, so by all means go ahead and buy the bread to store in your bread bag. Actually the bread bag is a great way to store any bread, especially if you don't like the idea of stuffing it directly into a plastic bag. If your bread lasts more than a day or so, you may have to put it into some kind of plastic, but it is better wrapped in fabric first. And, be sure to wash the fabric bags after each use; mold spores remain and can cause a new loaf of bread to spoil sooner.

I’ve been told to never store bread in the refrigerator. Apparently the temperature is just right for the starch to gelatinize - eeew. Bread keeps well in the freezer though. I know I do it all the time. Just be sure to freeze while it is still fresh. Cause if you freeze stale bread, when it thaws you get stale bread, of course.

When I imagined embroidery for my bread bag, cross stitch immediately came to mind. It seemed the perfect touch for a vintage project idea. I think it turned out beautifully. There are actually two different borders included with the projects, even though I did not get a picture of the second border.

This is a fairly simple project and the instructions are straight forward. The one thing that I will remind is to prewash your linen. I made the mistake of not washing my striped beige linen, so when I washed out the stabilizer, you guessed it the fabric shrunk. Won’t make that mistake again. By the way the lace is not in the hoop. It’s made by stitching several rows of a seam overcast stitch onto wash away stabilizer. It’s a technique that’s been around for a while, you will love it for this project. Have fun!