"Shoelace" Stitch - mini handsewing tutorial

I decided I could do a better job explaining the handsewing technique that I was trying to tell you about in my last post so here is a little mini-tutorial in case you would like to try it. In my example above I have used a contrasting 6 stranded embroidery thread just so everything shows up nicely. You would want to use a closely matching, strong sewing thread in your real work.

As you can see above, the needle is inserted into the felt from the inside of the seam into one side and then from the inside of the seam to the other side, each time moving forwards a few millimeters and alternating directions. When you pull the thread tight the stitches bite into the felt and become almost invisible. I tend to sew about a half of an inch or so and then pull the thread tight, then sew another half inch, tightening my stitches as I go. Below you can see the untightened stitches on the left, and on the right are stitches which have been pulled tight.

Gently pulling the stitches will result in leaves that look slightly notched. Pull the thread tighter, and you get distinctly notched leaves that curve outwards. Pull very tight, more on one side of a leaf than the other, and you get leaves that twist and bend (pull the thread too tight, and it will snap and you will have to stomp your feet and start over). It is a great way to add simple three dimensional shape to a plant. Also, the thread seems to disappear into the felt, but without crushing the outer shape the way that blanket or overcast stitches seem to do when they are pulled tightly. To help shape the leaf the way you want, sometimes you can take the leaf and tug on the shape slightly to redistribute the gathers you have made.

 

 Above are three leaves that I have stitched using this technique. Each leaf started exactly the same shape and size. By tightening and gathering the stitches you are able to make progressively more curved leaves. If you find that you aren't able to tighten the stitches easily and want a more curved leaf, you might have to try spacing your stitches out a little more.

You could use leaves like this to build your own succulent felt plant, or you could pair a leaf with a felt flower to make a pretty pin or clip. If anybody knows the real name for this stitch I would love to find out. 

Needle Felted Succulent Terrarium

Ever since I made my first felt terrarium I have searching my local thrift stores for the perfect glass containers so I can make some more. This week scroungers luck was with me and I now have 4 glass terrariums waiting to be turned into special little microcosms! It is snowing outside and I am thinking of summer, so I decided to make my terrarium out of felted versions of sun-loving succulents. I love the colours and shapes and I wish I had a patio where I could expand my collection - have you seen Geninne's? I am so jealous.

Succulents really lend themselves to being made from felt because their leaves have a natural "plush" look to them and the wool seems to take on their soft palette of greens and blues easily.

Because the beautiful colours of these plants was such a big part of my inspiration, I have to admit to being really fussy about colour with this project. I hand-dyed the sheets of wool felt, starting with either cream or white, to get different grades of blue-greens. To achieve the yellow-green of the tiny filler plants in the front of the terrarium I over-dyed very light blue-green felt with natural turmeric (handy tutorial from Lion Brand for dying wool with turmeric). For the jade plant, I layered wisps of wool roving in white, light green, bright magenta and soft lavender, in order to get the leaves just right.

I knew I would have to make some tall succulent plants in order to make my terrarium look full. I decided that I would start with a jade plant, as I had a real plant in my living room to study. After searching the internet, I think I may actually be the first person crazy enough to needle-felt a jade plant. Trust me to make an everlasting version of a plant that already is drought resistant and impossible to kill! It is made with a pipe cleaner armature. I needle-felted a smooth stalk and smaller side branch around the pipe cleaner in light green wool. The leaves were attached to the stalk, alternating directions with each pair. Oh, did I mention, I also stabbed myself about a hundred times? I need to figure out a better way to felt the edges of thin leaves that doesn't involve sandwiching my barbed needle between my fingers.

The "Hens and Chicks" type succulents were made almost the way you would make a rose. I started with a small cone of needle felted wool, and then built the plant around this, starting with the smallest leaves and adding larger and larger leaves. The outermost layers are not only double felt, but stuffed with wool roving. I also made a second tall succulent with many cone-shaped leaves, some tiny filler plants, as well as some large curling leaves that I used for the background. Everything was arranged and sewn down to a terracotta-coloured needle felted base.

I also discovered a new (probably only new to me) stitch for sewing together two layers of felt; I am going to call it "Shoelace" stitch, because that is how I sew it.
**Update: I have moved the description for the Shoelace stitch to its own mini-tutorial here.

Valentines Day Craftbook Challenge Fail

Check out this cute little frog! A dear reader, Raquel, made him following my instructions for the felt owl measuring tape and was kind enough to send me a photo of him. He is so great, good job Raquel. (I really love getting this kind of mail, if anyone out there completes any of my projects, please please please send me a photo!)

I want to thank you all again for entering the giveaway, your kind comments were overwhelming as always. Congratulations to the the winners! Gem of GemmaJoy, from Brisbane Australia, and Kristin of Kleas, from Minneapolis MN, your keychain clutches and earrings are in the mail. You both have lovely blogs and I am so happy that the randomizer picked you :)
So I had this fabulous idea to make myself some cute zakka-style oven mitts for Valentines Day. I don't even have plain-old regular oven mitts and I burn myself every time I try to take something out of the oven so I was pretty excited about this project. I gathered up my materials: some pretty vintage cotton rickrack and Japanese crochet lace trim, some linen-esque fabric with a cute red stripe pattern, pretty red and white dot lining and some space age silvery batting. And to make my project over the top, cross stitched little fawns from the wonderful book, A Rainbow of Stitches, by Agnes Delage-Calvet, Anne Sohier-Fournel, Muriel Brunet, and Francoise Ritz. 

How can this go wrong I ask you? OK, on to the FAIL part of my Valentines Day Craft Book Challenge project...
Do you see what I see? Maybe we need to do a little closeup: 

Is it just me, or does that little fawn look, sort of, well, Grinchy? I think it isn't just me. These little fawns are evil twins. I can't have them on my oven mitts. They look like they might burn me with their disapproving stares. Really, I don't know how I didn't notice this until I had appliqued the little red hearts and rick rack around each of them.

I think maybe it is just one of those problems that eyes are so dang expressive, and my little half-stitch is somehow making the deer all squinty and mean, and if you tried this, your half-stitch would make the deer look sad, or happy, or confused etc...

The project picture of these little fawns in the book look decidedly sweet, which is why I chose them in the first place:

So what am I going to do with these little hearts? Should I make them into snarky anti-valentines? Give them to someone nearsighted? Carefully unpick all the stitches and burn them so they can't come alive at night and do the bidding of an evil overlord? (perhaps I have watched too much science fiction)

Happy Valentines Day everyone! Tell a friend how much you care about them.

Surprise! Another Giveaway!

The Giveaway is now closed, thank you so much for visiting, and thanks to all of you who participated. I will be announcing the winners soon.

 Every time I see how many people have visited this blog I am amazed. It is wonderful to be able to share ideas around the world and to be part of this online community of talented, crafty and artistic people. So to show my appreciation for all the wonderful feedback I have been getting, I am hosting a little surprise giveaway! 

I am giving away 2 keychain clutches, and inside each clutch I am adding a pair of pretty silver earrings, all handmade by me. I will be randomly choosing 2 names from the comments and contacting the lucky winners by email. The giveaway will close Wednesday, February 9th. Anybody can enter, I am willing to mail these anywhere in the world. Please check the bottom of this post for entry instructions.

These cute little keychain clutches were made using a Keyka Lou pattern. I really enjoyed sewing with this pattern, which uses little darts to give the clutches a nice shape. I used a different Kokka linen canvas for each one: a patchwork Echino by Etsuko Furuya (above) and Ruby Star Rising by Melody Miller (below). They are both lined with a turquoise tiny heart quilters cotton and accented with vintage buttons I found at my local thrift store. I chose to interface the clutches with felt to add extra structure and to make them a little padded. The closure is a Velcro strip under the flap. The clutches are very small, approximately 2.5" by 4", but are useful for holding a few precious items such as a few cards and some small cosmetics like a lipbalm.

The silver drop earrings are made from some really cool crystals and dark purple pearls which I brought home from my trip to Taiwan. I bought them from the craft and jewellery district just north of the Taipei Main Station, which is crammed full of stores selling crystals and kits for making tiny beaded animals, purses, desserts and dolls. I actually bought one of these kits, which was a minor disaster I will have to tell you about some other time.

I haven't been able to find faceted metallic rondelle crystals like these anywhere at home and they are very special and unique. The beads dangle from a delicate silver chain and have lovely movement when wearing. They hang approximately 1" long from sterling silver earwires. Everything I used for making these earrings is new, and they have never been worn.

The design is modern with just a little edginess and they are perfect for a lunch out with friends or a night on the town. I guarantee you will get some compliments... you can tell them they were handmade for you by a friend!

Never want to miss a spontaneous surprise giveaway? Subscribe! Thank you all so much for visiting. Good Luck!

The Giveaway is now closed, thank you so much for visiting, and thanks to all of you who participated. I will be announcing the winners soon.

Year of the Rabbit Sewing Kit

 

Have you heard 2011 is the Year of the Rabbit? That sounds good to me; rabbits have always been associated with luck, so I hope this will be a lucky year. Rabbits are also symbols of the coming spring, and I am pretty sick of blah winter rains and no sunshine.

I wanted to make a little "extra present" for my sister, who just had a birthday, but has been studying hard and deserves a little extra something just for being herself. As she and I both have a fondness for cute little woodland animals, I decided to make her gift rabbit-themed, to go with the new year, and lucky, sunny wishes. I made her a cute little sewing kit, including a needle book, a white rabbit measuring tape, and a little needle felted rabbit teacup pincushion. 

 

The tail of the white rabbit measuring tape is a ball of needle felted cream wool, which also serves as the pull tab for the measuring tape. I used a tiny shell button in the center of the rabbit to trigger the mechanism for retracting the tape. I decided to keep the design simple and not include any details in the rabbit except for a green eye. The rabbit body was made in much the same way as my owl tape measure.

The needle book is 6" square, with one center page. I fused Timtex between the layers of fabric and felt to make the books cover very rigid (more "book-like" than most fabric books). On the inside, I used little panels of felt to separate each type of needle. There are also some pockets for holding sewing machine needles, a needle threader, and a pair of Japanese thread snips. I found a little piece of vintage velvet ribbon use as the tie. For the heavy needles, I sewed down two rows of a Japanese crochet cotton lace I purchased from Daiso in Vancouver; the larger needles can thread easily through the holes in the lace.

Here is the inside of the needle book: 

The pin cushion was the most fun of the three little projects to make. I really love needle felting. It feels like magic crafting. Before I tried it, I didn't know what all the fuss was about, but now it is my favourite thing to do late at night. My rabbit is made of grey and white felt wool, his eyes are black seed beads and his nose is a few stitches with pink embroidery thread.  I really like the expression on the little grey bunny. He looks like he was disturbed from his lunch of felt buttercups by a nosey crafter, and he is just waiting for me to look away so he can go about his business.

There are a lot of other teacup pincushions out there. The first time I saw the beautiful little worlds in a teacup made by Mimi Kirchner, I knew I wanted to try to make one. My teacup is like a very simple version of the beautiful scenes she creates.

Happy Chinese New Year!

Green Felt Bird

 

I really love birds. I think this came from my Mom, who took me on a lot of nature walks as a kid, made beautiful feeders and birdhouses for our yard and always took the time to point out the different species we saw and how she identified each one. She is also a very talented artist and carver, and filled our home with gorgeous, and sometimes quirky, wooden birds.

Lately, I have found a lot of other crafty and artistic people who find inspiration in the beautiful shapes and colours of birds. One such person is Geninne, from Geninne's Art Blog, who paints the most stunning and vivid watercolours. Her work is very modern, filled with colour, and every time I visit her blog I feel inspired to get out my paints and practice. If you haven't already stumbled on her, I highly recommend taking a look.

Another blogger whose love of birds inspires me is Abigail Patner Glassenberg, from While She Naps. Abigail is the author of The Artful Bird, a book filled with projects for sewing amazing birds from all sorts of different materials. My little green bird was created using a pattern from this book for a wren. It is made of hand-sewn wool felt, with needle felted and embroidered details, and legs made from craft wire. I really love how it stands on its own two feet! The colours I chose, the bright chartreuse and emerald green, were inspired by the fearless use of colour in Geninne's paintings.

 

This little bird is for you Mom!

Sewing the Negroni Shirt with Male Pattern Boldness

Is it possible that I have just bitten off more than I can chew? I just retrieved my sewing machine from the repair shop and I am feeling over ambitious? Maybe I am crazy? This is violating all the Craft Book Challenge ethic that I have been striving towards, but I just ordered the Negroni pattern from Collette so that I can participate in a Sew-Along!

Never mind that I have never sewn menswear before. Let alone anything with a collar. Or a sleeve placket. Or that when I picked up my sewing machine I had to ask them to show me how the button hole foot works because I have had my machine for almost 4 years and have never once used it. 

Perhaps crazy doesn't do me justice, maybe I am insane.

But I have faith in Peter over at Male Pattern Boldness. He has been making some really terrific clothing for himself and his partner and he only started sewing in 2009! I have been sewing since I was a teenager, so I should be OK, right? Right?

The Negroni pattern looks really retro-cool and the relaxed fit of the collar appeals to me. I think it is time I expand my sewing horizons beyond bags and accessories and very simple clothing, so I guess I'm sewing a hipster shirt for the other person living in the Tiny Apartment! The Sew-Along with MPB starts February 1st, making this project my Valentine's Day Plan. I sure hope the pattern arrives in time!

Psst! there's a promotional code for participants of the MPB Sew-Along that gets you a discount on the Negroni pattern at Collette; click the button in my sidebar if you are interested.

What are you working on for your sweet Valentine? Are you like me, attempting something huge and difficult? Are you more sensible and normal and you make heart cookies or bring them their coffee in bed that day? Is it a secret? I personally like surprises, but I have to measure him pretty extensively for this, so I think he's going to figure it out. He's all smart like that.

Also, have any of you had any experience with Collette patterns? Or attempted a mens button-down shirt? How did that go?