Felt?

I’ve been following the blog of Melissa Crowe, a fiber artist out of Portland Maine. Checkout Girl always has the most adorable felt-work pieces on it, and I always wonder to myself if I could do anything remotely like that. Well, thanks to my latest disaster hobby: drop spinning, I got a chance to try tonight. Anything to avoid admitting drop spindle defeat.

Anyway, I had some felt, embroidery thread and a small embroidery hoop, so I thought I’d play around a little. I started with clouds, because it was the only shape I could think of at the time. I had absolutely no plans when I started this.

I actually hate embroidery. Like, with a passion. I was a little worried that my embroidery hate would make this another drop spindle situation, but I was wrong. The felt makes this as fun and effortless as coloring, but as classy as embroidery. It’s a win win.

The clouds went down quickly and I got my next idea, a bird. Thankfully I had twitter bird blue on hand.

I stitched the back wing in a darker blue because on twitter, the birds back wing is slightly darker than the bird and the fore-wing.

This is an example of why planning ahead might have been a good idea. The third cloud is totally lost here. Oh well.

The beak goes on. This was the most embroidering I’ve done in years, and it still sucks. Believe me.

Legs were a lot easier, just a simple chain stitch.

The final touches are ready to go on.

I decided to use the space available to put my old sobriquet and short-lived business name, LARD.

Since I plan on using that hoop again, I couldn’t just leave it on there, so I took it off, and sewed another piece of the same fabric to the front of it, leaving just enough of a hole to turn the patch inside out again.

And here it is. Ready for… something. I really have no idea what. But it felt nice to do some fiber art again. Since my wrists started acting up, my knitting has basically ground to a halt, and I’ve been looking for a craft that can take it’s place. I’m not sure if this is it, but I really enjoyed this project. And it only took an hour or so.

Anyway, you should really check out Checkout Girl, and her corresponding etsy store. It’s much better and more adorable than this.