After by last post about creating a tree trunk, I was working on making the leaves a bit more pink. I think it’s a little hard to tell from these photos, but I added pink with colored pencil.
The photo on the left shows the leaves before adding color. The photo on the right is after I colored them with a pink colored pencil. It is much more evident in person that the color is different.
Then I needed to add the branch and leaves. I hand stitched them in place and the leaves are not directly tacked down to the bark. They are attached to their respective branches so they can be moved to different positions or even flutter a bit in the breeze.
Next was to stitch the lichen in place. Again, it is hand stitched down. I orginally had a lot more lichen on the bark but decided I didn’t want to overwhelm the beautiful colors that were already in the bark.
Then to decide how to finish and frame. I hand dyed the background fabric and hand stitched the bark in place. Then I laced the green fabric around a piece of matte board so it’s ready to frame. This piece is 14″ x 28″. I have decided to call it “Hanging On”. Next up is to take my recent pieces to the framers and get them all framed. I will share the framed pieces once they’re finished.
On to a new piece and the thoughts of what should I create? I like to look through my stash and see what I have to use up. I was gifted with a large amount of wool and other finished fiber pieces when my friend Paula stopped felting. What can I find for my next piece?
I looked through my bag of dyed silk pieces and also a bag of felted pieces that need to be re-used or cut up or whatever else comes to mind. So I found these two pieces. The stripey piece is a cobweb scarf with a fringe of felted cords. The silk is a piece that I dyed many moons ago.
As you can see in this photo, the scarf was very lightly felted and had lots of holes in it. I thought that the scarf was more like prefelt than completely fulled. So I decided to cut it into three pieces and layer them together so the felt would be more solid. I left the fringe off and thought I could use it later. I then added the piece of silk to one side as I thought the combination of the two would give an interesting surface to work on.
So I felted them together and the silk was barely attached after much work. Hmm… Plus you can’t see the stripes from the wool through the silk since it didn’t penetrate very well. What to do?
I turned the piece over and liked the back side much better. It looks like a tree trunk to me! I pulled the silk off the back which came right off and decided to work on the plain felt instead. I’m sure I will be able to use the silk piece for something else in the future.
So thinking tree trunk, I thought perhaps the cut off fringe could be made into a branch. I have rolled the fringe and edge up a bit and I’m trying it out on the tree trunk. The branch of leaves to the left is one that I made last year with wrapping yarn around wire and stitching and burning tea bag leaves.
I had a few bits of “lichen” that I made from painted interfacing so I added those into the tryout. So now I have a direction to go with this piece. Next up will be painting the tea bag paper and interfacing so I can make more leaves and lichen. I think I will jazz up the color a little bit since the tree trunk is so colorful. I’ll let you know how that goes in my next post.
The title of this post is misleading: although there are several diamonds in this story (in shape, not in value!) there is only one doll. Apologies for this, but “Many Diamonds and Just One Doll” just didn’t sound as good a title to me.
Let’s begin with the first, shall we?
The diamonds
If you use yarn in any way in a crafting project, chances are you end up with leftovers once you’re done. What to do with the lovely remnants of woolly, colourful string? If you’re anything like me you won’t bear discarding them willy-nilly, but keeping them in a bag without a plan also seems like a waste… Enter the Diamond Miner’s Quilt by Lucky Fox Knits.
Photo by Valya Boutenko
This project is not one to be made in a jiffy, rather it is meant to be an ongoing thing, to be added to as the years pass and one is presented with more little bits of yarn that are too precious to not make the most of. It’s a no-fuss, small outdoors knitting project, or simply a quick in-front-of-the-telly-knit when the brain is too tired but the hands are restless.
I currently have two full ziplock bags of diamonds, not nearly enough for a proper quilt, but slowly their numbers have increased and soon I shall have to start sewing some together to show myself I’m not simply hoarding teeny tiny pillows…
What I most enjoy about these is, I can look at them and remember which project they came from. It’s a way to reminisce about a past knit that I find comforting.
The best part? My knitter friends who know about this now have taken to gifting me their own remnants, so now I get to remember them in my future quilt as well. To me, that’s the definition of cosy.
The doll
Now to my latest fun project, Billie the Sheep. I forget how I came across this cute pattern, but it was before Christmas 2023 and I decided to buy it as a present to myself. Of course, this cute sheep would need some clothes and luckily the creator Gabrielle Vézina would provide the dress and cardigan to go with it.
Want to know the best part? This dress comes in a children’s size as well, so if you have a little girl in your life who needs a sheep doll and wants to match with it, you can make it happen! It’s simply too adorable.
All of this project is also made from remnants, the calico fabric I used previously as mock-ups for my own clothing, the threads on her face were gifted by a friend who no longer embroiders, the yarn was leftovers I hadn’t made into diamonds yet. The woolly part of her head is a bouclé yarn I used to knit a friend a cosy jumper and stabilised with some pre-felt (see, there’s felting in this post!). If this isn’t the cutest way to enjoy “leftover” project materials, I don’t know what is.
Have you made anything with remnant materials that you care to share? It doesn’t have to be fabric or fibre, anything goes! I love a good upcycle story, so feel free to share it with me below.
My local art group has been playing with collage for our last several meetings. We usually find an interesting online video to “follow” and then take off with the basic ideas from the video.
The first attempt was with small squares on a page and using a limited palette in all the squares. Then add some markmaking with different tools, small pieces of paper glued in place; then more mark making on top. This is my attempt at the technique. I wasn’t able to attend our meeting so I didn’t get any photos of my friends work.
The next video suggest starting with an old gelli plate print glued into the sketchbook. Then to “randomly” add collage, printing and painting on top “without thinking too much”. I never seem to do well with this type of activity as it gets way too jumbled and nothing ends up looking good to me.
Here’s where we were working and you can see my hideous collage results in the foreground of the photo. There are many layers and thinking a bit more about my choices might have improved this mess.
Here’s the final outcome of my collage. Still pretty hideous to me.
Sally created two collages using up a lot of her eco printed papers that she had in her stash.
Louise was still working on hers but had a great start.
And here’s Paula’s effort. She was working on two pages in a spread. I don’t think she was finished with these yet.
The nice thing about this project was using up painted and printed paper from our stash and just allowing ourselves to play a bit. Even though I wasn’t happy with my outcome, I had fun messing around 😉
I don’t know if any of you are fantasy fiction fiends. Some years ago now I read the first of a trilogy by Alan Dean Foster, called Spell Singer. It was about a man in the 1960/70s who managed to slip through time/space to a different dimension of our world in which animals wore clothes and talked (including Mudge, the man-sized otter with a foul mouth!) So why am I mentioning this? Well part of the story took place in a marshy area inhabited by a lot of very depressed mushrooms and toadstools with faces, which moaned and groaned and exuded misery, which was catching!
My mind immediately trotted down the rabbit hole of needle felting mushrooms – with faces. Mushrooms and toadstools of different varieties would have different temperaments and expressions. I thought of the white spotted red capped Fly Agaric; plain red capped Gomphidus Roseus (with a name like that they would definitely look odd); white button mushrooms; brown chestnut mushrooms; large flat horse mushrooms; fairy ring toadstools and, eventually, bracket fungi.
So I was off.
I decided that the bases of the fungi with stalks would represent a piece of turf, probably woodland or scrub. I had purchased, a few years earlier, some fibres sold for lining hanging flower baskets. It never got used for that because the bulk of it consisted of sheep’s wool, and I considered that it would be wasted if used for it’s original purpose. From the look of it, and of the quantity of “foreign matter” caught up in it, it was the sweepings from a mill floor or even a shearing shed. (I think that this was a good way of using up what would otherwise be wasted. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s available now.)
All the material was roughly dyed green but luckily so patchy was the dyeing that it was not a flat uniform colour. The different thicknesses of the fibres, the kemp and the vegetable matter all seem to have picked up different shades and tints of green. Just what I needed.
To save on this precious material, I used some scrappy scoured merino bits as a base for the underside of the grassy humps I was making, and then topped them with the basket fibres, and needled the lot together. I was delighted to find that, even close up, the result did look like a bit of scrubland grass.
In each case my fungi were to have faces and, hopefully, characters. I thought that as they were all wearing hats/caps, I’d place the faces at the join of the gills and the top of the stalk. I also decided that, rather than just a single lonely fungus, I’d make families.
Gormless Gomphidus Roseus mushroomsFly Agaric Mushroom family – Granddad, Mum and Dad with babyHairy Horse Mushrooms
The horse mushrooms are hairy, not because they were horse mushrooms but because I used some Herdwick fleece for the caps and didn’t know about shaving in those days.
In the end, the button mushrooms and the chestnut mushrooms not actually having any gills on view, I placed their faces on the top of their caps. I also gave the chestnut mushrooms Fymo eyes – little painted and varnished balls on each end of a piece of wire.
Buttons familyChestnuts. Looks like the Dad on the left has 2 wives and children – naughty!
The fragile, skinny fairy ring toadstools were to sit together in a circle, as they do, on a larger piece of grass with so much magic erupting from it that it became visible. This was represented by whisps of iridescent trilobal fibre (of which I have lots.) There was also magic appearing on the tops of their caps. These were made from scraps left over from a large piece of white merino felt in which a large quantity of the iridescent trilobal was embedded. (More about this felt at some time in a future post.)
Magic Fairy Ring Toadstools – chatting. What about I wonder?
These were the main families I made, but in the end I did make quite a few solitary mushrooms and toadstools (perhaps that’s why they were so melancholy?)
It was while I was making the Horse Mushrooms, which have black gills and therefore black faces, that I started to think about bracket fungi and Welsh male voice choirs. I can hear you saying “why?” It was the black faces. I am half Welsh. My mother’s family come from a South Wales mining valley, Ogmore Vale, and all my Welsh uncles were miners (hence the black faces), and they were all singers. (I even got to go down a pit on a rare holiday to stay with the family when I was about 7 or 8 – and I cried for the poor ponies down there even though they were well looked after). Anyway Welsh miners were magic to me, and having been thinking about magic since I made the fairy ring toadstools, I wanted to create a magical tree stump on which to grow a male voice choir of bracket fungi.
The inside of the tree stump was made up of part of a Jacob fleece which had absolutely refused to felt, and subsequently ended up in the cats’ bed – disappearing over time bit by bit into the middle of other needle felted items. I covered the stump in more of the basket fibres to represent a rotting, moss covered piece of wood. Thanks to the unevenness of the core Jacob I was able to easily create a surface with the ridges and dips usually found on oak trunks. There were also what looked like various entrances to the hollow centre of the stump. I lined these with black or dark grey fibres to give them depth and added some mixed brown and iridescent fibres to represent magic escaping from the stump. In two of these I also added a pair of (Fymo) eyes peering out at the world.
All that can be seen of the internal inhabitants
I added a sort of representation of tree age rings on the top of the stump, but also allowed the hole in the middle of it to remain and added a lot more escaping magic fibres.
Overflowing Magic
I made a lot of bracket fungi, both representing individual singers (baritones and basses – big and bigger ones)
The basses and the baritonesBig Bass himself
And Tenors, since they were smaller, in groups of three.
Some of the tenors
I know I researched a type of bracket fungus and was able to give them black “faces” on the undersides and brown tops with pale margins. However I cannot remember what they were, nor can I find my reference pictures. They may have been polypores of some sort.
Having made a batch of the “choir members” I needled them on to the stump, adding faces with singing mouths. I attached the stump to an artist’s canvas board, 20” x 16”, which I had covered with a piece of cotton patchwork fabric, coloured in various greens, to represent the surrounding trees. Originally I wanted to add a “dead man’s fingers” fungus, which could be conducting the choir, but at that time I had not heard of using an armature and it wouldn’t stand up on its own, so I gave up that idea.
The finished Tree Stump
My husband thought that the mushrooms would sell like hot cakes, but unfortunately I think I only sold one family. I ended up giving the rest away, apart from the tree stump which I have retrieved from the attic. I’d like to hang it on a wall in my workshop – if I can ever find a space large enough for it – if I can I might have another go at the dead man’s fingers.
Finally, I hear you saying. I have finished the forest floor nuno felt landscape that I have been working on since October.
I pinned the leaves in place and hand stitched them down. I also did a bit of trimming on the leaves that were further back in the landscape to give a feeling of distance.
Here they are stitched in place. I also added a few bits of darkness to leaves that were partially in the shade. I used a green felt tip pen for this.
And next, I auditioned flowers. Those of you who are felt purists, look away. I cut the flowers out of sketchbook paper. I think the contrast between the smoothness of the flowers and the matte fuzziness of the felt leaves make the flowers stand out more. Then I needed to make sure the flowers on the left were in the shade so I used a bit of Payne’s Grey watercolor to create the “shade”.
The flowers were stitched down with French knots and wool thread. The flowers on the left have a bit darker yellow than the ones in the “sunshine”.
I even got the piece stitched down to the background matte fabric and laced around a piece of matte board. So it is ready for framing, Yay! I have decided to call this one “Sunlit Dance”. Not sure what is on the agenda next but perhaps I should think of something to cover for the first quarter challenge.
When you look at this, what is missing? More shadows. So I needed to add the cast shadows from the trees.
So I added more blue sheer fabric to cast the shadows from the trees. Suddenly, there’s another glaring ommission (Antje pointed this out in her comment on my last post). The rocks on the left need to have shadows cast on them by the trees. So more dark blue sheer fabric is needed.
Ah, that’s better. You can really see the sun shining through the trees now.
Next up is leaves. The leaves on the left need to be in the shade, thus darker and more grey blue. The pieces of felt scrap that I originally found was not going to be enough.
So I searched for more felt and found a neutralized green that should work. Here you can see my messy workspace while I’m working. Other projects that are in process are on the back of the work table.
Here’s as far as I have gotten. I need to change out the leaves on the upper right as those are too bright in the shade of the tree. I may use some ink or paint to tone them down or I may just cut out more leaves in the neutralized green I used on the left. Then on to the flowers. I will need to find some light grey for the flowers on the left and brighter white for the flowers in the sunshine. Getting close to the finish now!
And just for entertainment purposes, here’s my dog Edgar in the big snow we had last week. The snow is almost as tall as he is and he’s decided that he doesn’t need to go wading!
I have continued to make slow progress on my forest floor piece. Since I showed you last, I have stitched down the rocks and added some shadows.
I decided on the final rock placement and then stitched them in place. I moved the rock that is now on the top right over from the left since it was much lighter. This reinforces the feeling of the light shining from behind the trees. Once the rocks were stitched in place, I decided they needed a bit more definition as they kind of looked like potatoes to me.
I remembered a book about nature journaling that I had checked out from the library by John Muir Laws. I decided to look him up online to see if he had some information about drawing rocks. I found a wealth of information on his site about drawing in nature. If you would like to improve your drawing skills, this is an excellent resource.
I took the photo from above and printed it out. Then I used a piece of tracing paper to sketch the rock placement. Then I used hatching techniques to give some shape to the rocks. These aren’t specific rocks. I find it much easier to draw/sketch when I have a photo of what I am trying to draw or I can look at a specific rock or landscape. But they look more like rocks than potatoes now.
I decided to use the same blue that is already in the nuno background for the shadows. That would tie all the blue bits in as shadows and move the blue over on to the right side of the composition too. I used a straight stitch to do the “hatching” on the rocks using #12 Sulky cotton thread. Once those shadows were in, I knew I needed to add cast shadows from the rock on to the ground. So I brought out my navy blue sheer fabric to create some cast shadows.
Here’s the piece after adding the sheer fabric around the rocks. I stitched the sheer fabric down with #40 machine thread with tiny stitches. Now guess what? I need more shadows in front of the trees. It’s always funny to me that I am working along and when some shadows are added, I can immediately see that I need more. So the next step is more sheer blue fabric to add the cast shadows from the trees. Then I will begin adding more leaves and the white flowers so that it will resemble my original collage below.
When Ann first invited us all to take part in a holiday card swap it was mentioned that our theme could be anything, it didn’t have to be particularly Christmassy…..and so mine wasn’t. I have to say that as more and more of the cards are now being shown, a part of me wishes I had gone with a Christmas theme, but it’s only a small part! My partner in the swap, Caterina, got in first with her card to me which I love and I felt that gave me permission to do what I really fancied doing! I won’t show Caterina’s card in case she’s going to do a post about it but let’s just say we were thinking along very similar lines.
I decided to make a mini Autumn/Winter forest floor mounted on to a 5” x 7” card. Starting with an off cut of Lutrador I used acrylics and Inktense to paint it grey with hints of green, or so I thought! Once I started to distress the Lutradur with the heat gun, what had looked very grey suddenly became very green as the green Inktense intensified. Rather than start again I decided to go with the flow and add more grey where needed later.
What was grey became very green!
Next I got out my box of Tyvek and Lutradur samples to see if there were any pieces of bark or leaves already made which I could use for this project.
The leaves were all too large apart from the one on the luggage label
All of the leaves turned out to be too large for the scale of the card apart from a small one attached to the luggage label on one of my workshop samples. This was the ideal shape and size so I used it as my template for the leaf to go on the card.
I had more luck with the tree bark as I found a few workshop samples, one of which hadn’t been painted and was the perfect size.
The barks been painted and I’m starting to audition pieces for the card
I can spend ages arranging and rearranging the parts, distressing the smallest pieces of Lutradur to get pleasing shapes and checking I’ve made enough to cover the background. Once I was happy with the amount of pieces I had the bark was embroidered and everything stitched down to a piece of brown cotton fabric.
And this is the finished card complete with Colonial Knots, felt pebbles and the little leaf. OK, it doesn’t scream “Christmas” but, as a keepsake, I hope it will remind Caterina of the friendships she’s formed with the F&F group and of happy Christmas 2023 memories.
Once I’d got Caterina’s card in the post I caved in and made a reindeer themed “Christmassy” card for my local textile group swap. After trying, and failing miserably, to draw a simple reindeer I turned to clip art and found this cute reindeer pose.
I’d recently seen images of beautiful little birds online that had been made from scrap fabrics and free motion stitch and these inspired me to do something similar with the reindeer.
I had so much fun making this one that I tried another pose, got carried away and went in to production!
These have been cut from fabric scraps and free motion stitched on to patterned card (which makes a great stabiliser!) I figured the antlers and legs would be a bit fiddly in fabric so I simply used a marker pen for those.
Cards have never really interested me in the past but these were such fun to make, I can see myself creating more to put aside for next year!
I hope all our readers have had a peaceful Christmas and here’s to a healthy, happy and creative 2024 for all of us!
This year we all decided to do a Christmas card exchange within the Felting and Fibre Studio group. It is just so lovely to make for another creative! It’s a bit frightening too as I wanted to give it my all. I also thought it might be a nice time to try something new and experiment – no personal pressure at all! I was so excited to be partnered with Leonor who I know has received her card at this point.
So, I put my thinking cap on. My first attempt was, and I am being perfectly honest here, an unmitigated disaster and the memory is probably best confined to the bin in which it quickly landed. So it was time to move on and put the thinking cap back on.
Okay so, by way of background. I had a poinsettia plant which I managed by some miracle to keep alive for about 5 years. I will quickly add that this had nothing to do with green fingers, it just liked its position in my sun room with my orchids as companions (again the orchids like the room). This summer the poinsettia developed a honey fungal disease which is a total disaster if it hits orchids so we had to part ways. I managed to stem the spread of the disease and the orchids are safe for now.
As a tribute to that most beautiful poinsettia, I thought it could be my focus for the card exchange. I wanted mixed media so I felted each petal, then I did some free motion embroidery on each one. I hand sewed it onto a felted backing and added hand dyed stamens to the centre. It was then mounted on the Christmas card. It was a little too big for the card so I decided to mount it in a frame before posting it off. The postal service can be a bit dodgy but I am pleased it worked on this occasion. From Leonor’s message to me, I think she likes her card and I have made more since.
Here is a little slide show of the highlights of my process. Sorry, I forgot to photograph the hand sewing so you will have to use your imagination for that part. Some of the photos are slightly distorted so apologies for that too.
I laid out merino and viscose for the petals
Wetting down the petals
The rolling stage for the petals
I dried the petals on a baking rack
I prepared the petals for free motion embroidery. I started with tear away stabiliser but it was proving difficult to get all the bits of paper out of the sewing!
I changed across to Solvy for the machine embroidery
It only takes a few seconds to dissolve the Solvy
Dissolving the solvy
Nearly there!
The template was actually a circle. The photo is distorted
The base, again a circle
Here is the finished Poinsettia after I hand sewed it onto the base
As the finished flower was a bit too big for the card, I mounted both in a frame.
Here’s a close up of the stitching and the stamens which I hand painted
This was a fun make with a bit of learning thrown in for good measure. You might like to make some too. If you do, I would love to see it! Also if you have any questions on the making just pop them in the comments section and I will be glad to answer them!
Wishing you peace, love good health and happiness and, of course lots of creativity over the Festive Season and for 2024!
