Pillow tutorial

Today I sew a pillow for my mother who comes to visit me from Argentina:




It was a wonderful way of using the embellisher.

You can do this with any curtain or upholstery fabric (I had a kind of polyester one - rather shiny - I bought yesterday in a sale).

First I put the fabric on top of a cotton batting:



and basted it with security needles (not many) so that I keep an eye on the shrinking!:




I punched the whole fabric to the batting:




After this I felted the flowers on the print with small pieces of wool, following the paint strokes.


I also mixed the yellow wool roving with a little red one so that it looked more like painting.

I hand stitched with my self dyed variegated threads and running stitch the leave contours.

I used alternatively an outline and a running stitch for the flower contours:




I punched yellow organza from the back (not moving the embellisher) so that I got dots to do the background more interesting:





I did some free machine embroidery over some part of the print with a light zig zag:




I appliqué 4 pieces of check fabric to improve the design and stitched over these:




I did the piping with the embellisher. It is the most wonderful tool to do this!!!:

I put a cord on a strip of the check fabric and punched the borders together very near to the cord.

For the back I took a yellow tapestry fabric and sew a zip on it.

And here is one more detail of the pillow where you can see the piping:



Enjoy!

Matrioshka

I did this matrioshka with 6 dolls with the embellisher.

I felted all the pieces out of wool roving. This is one of the things you don't want to do with this machine... I broke about 7 needles and I ought to have done it with the traditional felting method, I mean wet! It was a good experience though...

The felt is quite stable. For the biggest doll (15") -the smallest is 2"- I used a piece of Thermolan as a base (which did the whole thing even thicker and caused the needle breakage, but this was because I also used many layers of wool...).

I'm happy with the end result. They can stand (if no wind) and children love them (I won't let them play with them though....)

Experimenting

I experimented with the embellisher to see what 3d surfaces you can get and got these forms.

They look interesting and I'm thinking about the use I can give them...

Little Princess - Season 2

Now begins the season 2 of the series of the Little Princess. She is traveling to the States to Ruth Rae and is so happy to emigrate to the States!

She just wanted to say good bye to the woods of Austria before she left and let me take her picture near some mushrooms...



And then she just laid in the sun dreaming of the exciting flight...



...and before that she got her name stamped on her back for customs to know they must treat her like a princess!!

Little Princess

While the queen mother was having some personality problems, the little princess decided to sit by her and keep her company...

She wanted to show her the small silver flower she got from Austria...

Display

I want to show you the way I display this kind of pieces.

I like to accentuate the organic feeling of them putting them in a group of something that is organic too.



I don't care about dust because I only need to tap them from time to time.

The Discovery of Evil

This is my last piece. I found a wonderful possibility with the embellisher for the background and I think I will explain it in the tutorial for Fibre&Stitch in December...

I let fly my imagination and came up with some techniques I want to keep in my repertoire.



I used once more one of my ceramic heads, I love to use them! and some stones as beads.
I used silk roving in the globus.



I wanted to let it look somehow like a medieval manuscript (I can't get rid of these!) :-) so I put a kind of seal on the lower right. Here I embedded some lace and used mother of pearl buttons.



I had my fun with it! The little guy standing on the globe represents the sun.