Saturday, May 30, 2015

Mystery Challenge - Florence Nightingale Inspired

Its another month of #sewingmagic for me. Working on wedding preparations (my son is getting married a week from today!) and I joined in the Mystery Challenge Blog Tour for May . . . .

This month's theme is Moments and People Throughout History. I was assigned Florence Nightingale. The idea is to #create through inspiration . . . and I learned more about Florence than I ever knew.

She's not just a Nurse. She's not just an old maid born in the 1800s, with a trust fund.

She is the #LadywithaLamp; so I chose the photos I found of her with the Lamp . . . with a twist on what Florence promoted most in her life.

". . . Every woman, or at least almost every woman, in England has, at one time or another of her life, charge of the personal health of somebody, whether child or invalid,—in other words, every woman is a nurse. Every day sanitary knowledge, or the knowledge of nursing, or in other words, of how to put the constitution in such a state as that it will have no disease, or that it can recover from disease, takes a higher place. It is recognized as the knowledge which every one ought to have—distinct from medical knowledge, which only a profession can have.

If, then, every woman must at some time or other of her life, become a nurse, i.e., have charge of somebody's health, how immense and how valuable would be the produce of her united experience if every woman would think how to nurse.

I do not pretend to teach her how, I ask her to teach herself, and for this purpose I venture to give her some hints."

--Florence Nightingale, from the Preface of her book (Notes on Nursing: What It Is and What It Is Not).

Flo improved the health of households. She promoted cleanliness, sanitation, sunlight and concern for well being. The inspiration came from her service as a nurse in the Crimean War. Through her book, "Notes on Nursing: What It Is and What It Is Not," she provided detailed guidance on how to care for the sick, which in turn encouraged us all to maintain a clean and inviting environment in our homes (as well as hospitals).

With that in mind, I found a free picture of Florence with the Lamp (above). I decided to digitize the photo and embroider onto an apron, adding my take on "here fishy fishy" for the woman who wears the apron.

I used a photo program on my computer to erase portions of the photo.

Then digitized the photo using my Brother PE Next Software and started stitching!

For the apron, I chose Sew4home's Pleated Apron. I used this as a base and used my sewing magic to create an apron that had enough space for the embroidery. I used fabrics from my #fabrichoard and leftover ribbon from my ribbon collection.