Merry Christmas Everyone!

Santa gets the blues!

A trio of little stuffed and embroidered Santas. All on a blue background.

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The body is made from scraps of fleece fabric, needle felted onto a base of recycled fibres with the addition of dyed wool sliver (roving), machine quilted and heavily embellished with hand embroidery, beads and sequins. The face is hand painted with needle felted eyebrows and the moustache and beard are fine merino fleece or silk fibres needle felted in place. For the technically minded, stitches used on these pieces include: interlaced chain band, interlaced herringbone, cretan, straight stitch and trellis stitch.

Look..................

what that man's done to my workshop. See that?!

 

It's no wonder I'm losing my motivation!

Slow, slow, quick quick, slow

I've picked up the slow cloth to work on again in the evenings before I go to bed!

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I didn't imagine it would be THIS slow! I have so much less time for everything since the other occupant of the house retired........

Hubble Bubble now there's trouble..................

 

Having fun with stitches and witches!

 

 

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The Fabric got Faces, now the Witches have Stitches

 

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and little wired cloth hands.

My shed!

It may not be pretty or quaint, or architecturally interesting (it's a garage circa 1960).

 

but in here, I have everything I need!

 

this is what I was making, the fabric now has faces.

 

 

Mangling!

I need to make some more "wise ones, witches and wizards" ready for the Lammas Fair in July, so I got busy in the workshop. I got the embellisher, fondly known in this house as the "Mangler" out
to make some fabric.

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Blue for a witch or a wizard. A piece of ecofelt, some silk scraps and wisps of wool tops (roving).  Sometimes it's difficult to decide which side to use, the top or the back. Why the machine stitching? Well, when you needle felt a fabric like this you destroy some of the fibres. The machine stitching helps to stop the fabric stretching and gives it back a bit of "body".



Slow cloth

One more mediallian done.

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This is the whole cloth so far...................

Round and round we go.........................

Starting a new "mediallion" on the slow cloth. Perhaps I should call it a "Slow Sampler".

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Slow going

The weather has been just miserable; cold, wet and grey. I've got one or two projects going but I still needed to have something to fill in with - I can't sit still - so I got out the Slow Cloth. I came across it, as you do, while I was ferreting around looking for something else!

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When I put it away I was wishing that I had cooured the fabric in some way first. I've added lots of small straight stitches to take down the white background.

I've put it down by my favourite chair, along with a pack of needles and threads.

Got the needle

I've been having a go at needlefelting:

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and a bit of dollmaking: