Tutorial: Embroidered Pendant

I started playing around with embroidery this winter after falling in love with this book. After some practice, I stumbled across a shop on Etsy that sells embroidered initial pendants. They were expensive, though, and I thought I could probably make one of my own. I ordered three pendant blanks here at this shop, and then I began sketching some designs.

After considering my sketches, I settled on the little badger with a flower. Who doesn't love sweet badgers, especially when they're wearing aprons? 

The next step was deciding on a color scheme. Now, I know badgers are supposed to be black and grey, but I didn't have any black DMC thread at the time, and I couldn't take the time to run to the store. I wanted to get started right away! So, this little badger was going to be brown with a honey colored stripe down her nose. I was pretty sure she wouldn't mind.

Then I traced my design to the fabric and began to stitch. I used white Kona cotton, a very soft, densely woven fabric, for this project.

After I had finished embroidering my design, I traced the shape of the pendant backing on my fabric, cut the shape, allowing an extra 1/4" all the way around to fold the edges under, and ran a long basting stitch around the design, following the marks I had traced for the shape of the pendant.         

Then, I gathered positioned a small piece of white flannel directly behind my embroidered design, placed the backing piece on top of that, and then drew up my basting stitches. After that, I placed the entire piece inside the pendant frame, put the back piece in place, and bent the metal edges down to hold it in place in the back.

This is the finished pendant. It turned out pretty well, but I do think I'd like her better if she were black. And maybe if her nose weren't so bulbous. Still, it was a good first attempt. I like the pendants I ordered well enough, but I do wonder if the embroidered initial pendants I first fell in love with on Etsy use pendant blanks that are of a better quality. These are good, but not great. They were only three dollars, though, and if I consider the cost of my other materials--very minimal--it was a pretty inexpensive project.