Felt Frenzy

I love to work with felt and I'm in the process of teaching myself to embroider.  I thought I would combine the two by doing them together.  I also thought to kill yet another bird with this one stone by making myself something to keep my needles in.

The upside of embroidering on felt is that I don't have to use a hoop.  The downside is that the image transfer process leaves me limited to which designs I can do.  My current method is to use tracing paper to bring the design to the felt and I simply sew right on through it. When I'm done I carefully peel away the tracing paper and use my needle-nose tweezers to clean up the left over bits.  From what I've read this is a perfectly legitimate process. This method doesn't work well for denim though; the paper tears much more easily and it's difficult to see where the stitches are once that's happened.

I have a couple of embroidery heroes, one of which is Aimee Ray from Little Dear Tracks.  I bought her book Doodle Stitching: The Motif Collection which  is chock full of lovely designs and project ideas.  Aimee's first book Doodle Stitching is also fantastic and both are well worth every penny.  The below project has a cherry blossom design from The Motif Collection.

Cherry Blossom Needle Book

The next needle book features an under water theme, the koi design is from the original Doodle Stitching book.

Underwater Needle Book - Koi

Up-close Koi!

Free style design with beads

A - color mishap!

I've made several other books as gifts for family and friends but neglected to photograph those. Darnit.  I really like making these little books and feel limited  only by my own  creativity. Which admittedly is quite lacking sometimes.  Oh, did I say that out loud? heh.


Here's a Scottie dog I made this past week, just because I think they're adorable. I was thinking about embroidering a thistle, which is the Scottish national flower.  Due to the size constraints, and let's be honest my own ability, I chose to use a simple embellishment in the colors of the thistle instead.

woof

I have quite a bit of black felt so I'm always looking for things to make with it.  I also have a surplus of Tennessee Volunteer orange felt (thanks to my sister-in-law) so I made a kitty, inspired by Aimee Ray's fat kitties.  This went to my friend Conni, who is a huge Vols fan.

One of a kind Vols Kitty

I have various and sundry other felt creations, including some food items I've made for my daughter...

Mr. Broccoli says "Eat Me!"

Yep, I'm Toast.

And finally, a decorative letter L..

The Letter L

In my next post I'll share some of my non-felt embroidery.  Thanks for stopping by and checking out my stuff!
Please feel free to share embroidery or felt links, I'm always looking to learn. :)