The winner of the felt notebook is Rhonda Lynn! Rhonda Lynn please contact me with your snail mail address at laneruthe at gmail dot com and I will send you the notebook. I used a random number generator to pick the winner and the number was 11. So congratulations to Rhonda Lynn.

Back in October, I told you about a project I am working on with Deb Stika using her contemporary and modern designs. So I am posting another free design today in PDF format that you are welcome to use in your work. I would love to see if you make anything. Last time, Teri Berry made a beautiful nuno felted creation from one of the designs. You can see her piece here.

This next design is in the Psychedelic category.

This is Deb’s hand stitched representation of the design. The background fabric is a piece of screen printed fabric that I made several years ago.

And this is my machine stitched cut back applique made with two layers of felt. Since several people thought it would be a good idea to have some tutorial aspects in the proposed book, I did a short tutorial to show you how I made this.

I started with the printed design on paper. I then taped down water soluble fabric over the design and traced it. Use a regular pencil, not a colored pencil. Colored pencils have wax that gum up your sewing machine needle.

I then chose a couple of pieces of screen printed felt in different colors. It helps if the colors are different either in value or hue.

I placed the design over the felt and then…

pinned it down. It would probably be better to baste all the layers together but I was being lazy and it actually didn’t shift that much with stitching.

I then began free motion stitching the outer edge. With free motion stitching you need to use a darning foot, lower the feed dogs and set your stitch length to zero. I stitched all the lines at least twice over.

Here’s a little bit closer view of the stitching.

Then I started working on the inner lines. I made sure to stitch in place at the end of each inner design to lock the thread and then just moved the needle to the next spot. At the end, you have to trim off all the threads that are between the stitched designs.

And then I stitched, stitched and stitched some more. It took a while.

I cut off the excess threads and trimmed off the extra water soluble fabric from around the edges.

Then I soaked the piece in warm water to dissolve the water soluble fabric. Then I let the piece dry completely. I forgot to take any photos of the cut back process. While carefully looking at the paper design, I decided which areas to cut out. Use a sharp pair of embroidery type scissors and cut inside your stitched lines. Only cut the first layer of fabric or felt as close to the stitched line as possible. But don’t cut through your stitching.

And here you can see the green beneath showing where I cut out portion of the upper blue felt.

I then did some really dense stitching on the “black” part of the original design.

And this is the result. I think if I was going to mount this piece, I might cut around the outside of the design to give it more definition. But I am leaving it how it is for right now. So here’s another mini challenge, use this design in your own work with whatever media you choose. You can increase the size of the design if you’d like or leave it as it is. Have fun!

Psychedelic 1 with copyright