Dec 20 07
I Can Now Post Pictures!
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!
So pleased you’re back with us again.
Lovely Christmas card.
Each year I ‘think’ I shall do one, photo it and get some cards printed and each year it doesn’t happen.
Have you tried taking your photos with light hitting it from very low down so the ‘shadows’ forrmed by the texture show up more?