Queen Embroidery Whimsical Sewing Sets

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I'm a crafty kinda gal.  I like to sew.  I have sewn since I was 6 and I have always loved to do hand work:  fine embroidery, crewel embroidery, needlepoint, cross stitch, quilting, crocheting, knitting you name it.  My grandmothers both did hand work as does my Mom.  I also love to scrapbook.  I'm about a year and a half behind but still.  I love the texture of layered paper and I love the little embellishments especially the miniatures.

Unfortunately, I don't have a whole lot of time.  I work full time.  I have my last child, a terrible teen, at home.  I am the queen bee of a very active women's club. Life is extremely busy.  So to satisfy my need to make stuff without the months it can take, I bought an embroidery machine a few years back, justifying it by the thought that I would be able to make gifts.  And, really, that's what I've done.  I've made sets of pillowcases for extended families for Christmas.  Large sets of monogrammed kitchen linens for weddings.  Shirts and wallets; soap dispensers and afghans; pincushions and baby blankets. There's rarely been a week that I haven't used that machine in the 3 years I've had it. 

At some point a few years back, I bought a lot of cigar boxes on ebay.  They are great boxes.  At the time, I only knew that I wanted to use them for something but didn't know exactly what. So they've sat on the shelf in my sewing room.

Then a year later I was at a scrapbook store and I saw someone had made this really cool picture in a frame using the Graphics 45 collage papers.  I wanted to make one but wanted to make something practical.  I thought of my abandoned lot of cigar boxes, sitting patiently on the shelf, waiting to be made into something, anything. So I made a Christmas box.  I thought it would make a great place to keep sewing tools and Voila!  Queen Embroidery was born.  Here's a picture of my Christmas box:

The first box I tried, I used my machine to embroider on balsa wood.  A few years back I was going through Victorian Christmas at the Puyallup Fairgrounds (pronounced Pyooăl-ŭp) and saw a woman who had done an extensive snow scene on balsa wood.  It was way cool and I thought it would be fun to do.

It was actually kind of fun but it doesn't take well to dense embroidery the designs can just pop out of the wood.  So that limits what can

 be sewn with it. Most of the designs I like have some depth to them so they didn't work well with the wood.  Plus, it curls up and is hard to glue down to the box.  Here is a picture of the snowman box I made.

 The outside turned out well but you can see on the inside that I miscalculated the design on the wood and it went over just a tad.