etsy mini

Tuesday 27 May 2014

Felt brooches - new!

Last weekend I had a craft fair to go to and it's always nice to have some little bits and pieces for people to buy. After a lot of thought I suddenly came up with the idea of brooches. I have made flower brooches before but lots of people make those and I wanted something original, something to reflect my artwork. After more thumb chewing I realised that an awful lot of my pieces have little cottages in them and decided to make cottage brooches. I've given them all brightly coloured doors and stitched the windows in as I do in my pictures. At the suggestion of one of my FB followers I have embroidered flowers growing up the wall on one of them too.
In the end I didn't make the craft fair as I injured my foot so I have a couple listed in my etsy shop.

Friday 2 May 2014

Embroidery on felt

I've often added small amounts of hand embroidery to my felts but rely heavily on my sewing machine to add detail and texture with free machine stitching. Last week I was dealt a blow when my machine threw a wobbley and decided it was no longer going to wind the bobbin! It was taken to the repair shop and I was left wondering how to work without it. Every time I came up with an idea I realised that I couldn't complete the picture without my sewing machine.
I decided to experiment with LOADS of hand embroidery. First I fused fabrics of different textures and colours to a prefelt with my needle felting machine. Next I wet felted quite thinly over the top so that they would show through in places. I decided I wanted a simple image and our fields are brimming with flowers at the moment which prompted me to try flower fields. This is what I came up with at first
 Can you see how the stitches in the yellow field are tiny and the ones in the foremost field are much bigger? This helps to give a sense of perspective. The further away something is the smaller and less detailed it seems. I wasn't entirely happy with this so I added more flowers.
I felt that the extra colours made a big difference and there was lots of texture. Here is a close up
I did enjoy making this and was pleased with the final result but it took hours and hours to create a relatively small piece of work with thousands of stitches. It measures 10.5 x 6.5 inches and I would have to charge at least £50.00 if I were to sell it. That is around $85.00 for my US readers. Bearing that in mind I have decided to keep  it as a sample for my own reference. Back to the drawing board!
If, by any chance, anyone disagrees with me and would like to purchase this piece feel free to message me.