Joy Of Stitching

I've been working on this months - April's - Contemporary Quilt Group 's Challenge with The Quilters Guild of the British Isles. I began by making some headless sheep using water soluble plastic and freemotion stitching. Being a bit scared of getting their heads wrong I decided to make their heads later out of felt Then I machine embellished wool roving onto a felt background and added some wool to create the path and wall. I hand stitched and felted yellow flowers, Some grasses Swirly clouds and mountain trees Backed with a lovely grey wool fabric which I turned over to the front of the work as a self binding. Finally, I used a variegated thread to create a quilting stitch along the binding.  I thoroughly enjoyed working with the felt and wool  I'm going to explore these further.

Happy St. Davids Day from Port Talbot - Wales  This is the third of my contemporary quilt challenge quilts. And being March's I thought a daffodil most appropriate. AND With it being St. Davids Day today (1st March) St. David is a patron Saint. of Wales AND The Daffodil is our National Flower You'll see lots of these worn in Wales today. If you see someone with a daffodil on elsewhere in the world on 1st March Chances are they are Welsh and showing their Welsh pride.  Anyway I digress This is another project using my new needlefelting machine. I cut out the daffodil shapes in felt  and needlefelted them onto the back of the black felt background to create a 'painterly' effect on the front.  I then freemotion stitched around the outlines and into the leaves and flower I stitched a grided 'nine patch' effect and then stitched around the edge using yellow thread and a zig zag stitch. I had intended ...

Well I'm busy working on my second contemporary challenge quilt - Febuary's offering. I've decided to keep to a Welsh theme for the year. And this one is the Welsh Pear or paisley to most of you. I'm still playing on my needlefelting machine. And here is a close-up of the work in progress. The red and black fabric you can see around the outside edge has been used as a backing to the black felt. I've then needlefelted the outer border and a paisley shape from the back of the work creating a more subtle red and black image. I'm currently hand stitching quilting lines onto the work. Just thought I'd share with you my progress so far. Update - All finished now - mind you it's not a very photogenic quilt - looks better in real life. Still - I've finished it - and I've learnt lots in the process.

Well my Stitching friends, I got a Needlefelting Machine for Christmas, and here are some samples of my playtime with it.  The  possibilities are endless. And it's so quick and simple of use too. So far I've been using felt, and leftover wool strands.  Above and below are two pictures of some flowers I made. The one above is from the back of the work and so you get to see where the fabrics have been punched through to the back, which gives a lovely painterly effect. The one below is the front. This is simply felt on felt with a few strands of wool for the stems.  In the one below I've needlefelted some voile onto a felt background I'm playing around trying to get a beach/sand effect As I'm very much learning about my machine at the moment I watched a programme on Create and Craft (Shopping Channel) yesterday where I picked up a couple more tips I'll be trying out watch this space.....I'll let you know how it goes. Off to p...