As January started I found I wanted something unimportant to fiddle with. You know something that didn’t have a deadline, had to be made for a class or show, or have any practical purpose. I had been sorting through all my bits and pieces of felt that accumulate,  the ones that may be good for a picture or are just too good or interesting to get rid of.  I was trying to sort them into possible uses and tidy up my area of the living room. I wasn’t very successful at either of those things but I did manage to get the felt into sizes.

I decided a slow stitch, random sampler sort of thing would be good. I had lots of small pieces to choose from. I chose a quite dark piece with some lumps on it. I have fiddled with the picture to show the colours properly. This is the best I can do. The dark green is darker or maybe deeper. The light areas are not as light as they show. The shine on the silk areas is causing a lot of bounce back and messing with the colours.

I think I used the rest of this strip of felt for a needle book. I marked out the year before I remembered to take a picture.

Next was picking out some threads. I wanted to stay with the same palette. They are different brands but all 6-strand floss

I started with the year. Strangely, the 4 was the hardest number.

I thought it might look interesting to make a flower on one of the bumps. I used lazy daisy stitch and colonial knots

I added some little leaves under the flower. I did them 4 ways but they are too small to see the stitches properly. They look like leaves so that’s good enough. I wanted to do something else with another bump and did this wheel sort of thing.  I didn’t like it but I lived with it for a few days trying to think of a way to improve it.

In the end, I just decided it was just ugly and I cut the the stitches off. I added another lazy daisy with much looser petals and added a contrasting stitch to the middles and I used stem stitch and outline stitch to a…. swirl? ….curly queue? not sure what you call it but I like them.

Next was a bug for one of the bumps. It doesn’t look in but he is nice and round. I added a stem and leaf to the daisy and another swirl thing but in back stitch.

The swirl looks very white, even though it is cream.  It stands out too much so I took it off and changed it to a darker colour. I also did stem or maybe its outline stitch. I can not remember, left stitches are one and right stitches are the other. Both give a much smoother line than back stitch.

I like the light streak of silk on the right and thought it looked like a tall flower so that was the next step. I used colonial knots and French knots for the flowers.

That’s as far as I am. I am going to add some more arms to the swirls but not sure what else. I was thinking I might stitch the month on it and start a new one on Feb 1 and see if I can keep it going all year. Then I will have to figure out how to make it into a book like Ruth does.