December 20th, 2007
OK, this has been such a crazy month that I haven’t gotten to do much sewing, but I did manage to make an oversized holiday greeting card for a free motion embroidery/FM Quilting/Needlefelting group I’m in. I started out with a piece of commercial gold batik fabric that I overdyed with turquiose, leaving me with a green/green-gold background. I fused 3 “rows” of red flower petals around an empty center to form a stylized poinsetta, and then placed a piece of scrap batting behind it so I could trapunto my flower. Here’s a picture of the poinsetta when the outer 2 rows had free motion embroidery around the edges:
Once I finished embroidering the edges of the central row, I cut away the excess batting and here’s what the backside of it looked like:
I then fused 2 holly leaves below it and I was really wanting to add some texture to this card, so I hand sewed 3 small red pompoms into the center to act as my berries. (By the way, did you know you can spell it pompom OR pompon?!) I did some free motion embroidery around the leaves and here’s a pic of most of the card at this point:
…and here’s a close up of the bottom half; it shows the texture of the pompoms better:
(The card is roughly 12 1/2 x 9 1/2 now). Next, it was time to move back to the center of my poinsetta. I got a needle felting machine a few months back and I have just struggled with it. I was so excited when I bought it and had all kinds of visions of what I could do with it, but I’m just not talented with it! I have a friend, Nancy Bruce, (if you ever have the opportunity to see her work or take a class, DO IT because she makes the most beautiful things!), and she is always whipping up cool stuff and this gets me so inspired but when I try it, it’s like dullsville. Anyway, I wanted to use the center of this poinsetta as a place to do something fabulous with my needle felting machine. Didn’t happen here! I cut out a rough circle of some kind of cheapo synthetic fabric from Joanne’s and then I shredded the edges with the felting machine. Next, I needle felted a piece of hand-dyed silk batting on top of it, but the color was kind of boring, so I needle felted some silk roving in another color on top of it. By this point, I still didn’t like it, but I was running out of time! I did some minor FMQ around the edge of the center and then sewed beads on top to kind of mimic those large seeds in the center of a poinsetta. Here’s a picture of the center:
I spray basted the top to a piece of Peltex and stitched around the perimeter of all pieces with invisible thread. Next, I did some background quilting and in this case, I used the irregular swirl design. To me, Peltex is way too flat and that’s why I did the trapunto under the poinsetta; I figured it was a good way to get some texture into this FLAT piece. What’s weird is that the trapunto hardly is noticeable and I don’t know why. Here’s a pic of the finished product:
Here’s a tangential view and it gives a hint of the texture:
(perhaps “hint” was an overstatement!) Anyway, that’s all I’ve got to show but it sure is nice to be able to post pictures again!
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