Pause in Page Creation

Just taking a little pause in the felt book page creation to think about what to do on the next pages. Meanwhile inspired by the hoop sewing from The Creative Family book which I have borrowed from the library I made this.



I found some lovely bright orange hessian in Spotlight the other day, along with some cream and natural colours, and also got some of the wooden hoops that I have seen on several blogs for creating wall displays of pretty fabrics. I had just been reading The Creative Family where Amanda had described using burlap and a thick needle to teach embroidery to children and had also seen the stitching she had shown on her blog shop update post and this idea just flowed on from there. Also check out this Flickr pool - Swatch Portraits.

I stitched on the flowers with a small circle just around the middle and then used stem stitch in two greens of floss for the stem of each flower, reversing the colour combination on one of the stems. Just to finish it off I did a running stitch around the hoop with some of the hand dyed wool. After I had finished the stitching I loosened the hoop and removed the inner circle from the back. I put a piece of calico over the back of the stitching and replaced the hoop. This hid all the knots and made the background a little more solid. Last of all I trimmed the fabric flush with the hoop and glued some trim over it to hide the edges of the fabric. A little piece of ribbon and it was ready to hang!

Back view.

Here it is - hanging in amongst all the other assorted bits and pieces I like to look at in my creating room. Incidentally it is also where I do the ironing (when I have to!!) and I have lots of lovely things to look at. The dreamcatcher was made with my kids when they were much younger that now and I still love to have it hanging where I can see it. The cat is from the book I referred to in my post about the bird Christmas ornament. All much nicer to look at than a painted brick wall.