My May journal quilt project was embroidery on one of my hand-painted silks.
I talked about this in this week's podcast episode and all the difficulties I had with it, although I learned a lot in the process; so from a learning value perspective, this was a great project. I learned that silk requires a much different treatment as a background than other fabrics I've been embroidering on. I learned that certain threads don't really play nice with silk. (The spiral center was the Razzle thread and it was just way too slippery to combine with the slippery silk. No end of headaches with that one.)
I learned how to do the "magic chain"--a chain stitch with two threads where you alternate the colors. Cool beans.
You can see I skipped a couple of stitches in this example--that petal was a very-late-night-can't-sleep attempt. I learned I shouldn't embroider after midnight.
I also learned I shouldn't use a chalk pencil for an embroidery design. Couldn't for the life of me see what I was supposed to be doing. Hence, some very whonky flowers.
After I finished this, I started doing some crewel embroidery on a piece of my hand-dyed cotton. Lookie so far! (Okay, I snuck a WIP in here. But one flower is finished, so it counts!)
I love crewel. I'm a crewel girl.
And...on the spur of the moment...I decided I wanted an iPad case with a couple of pockets to hold my stylus and the little (very easily lose-able) packet of extra stylus tips during all my travels this summer. I talked about this on my podcast episode too--but the short story is that I decided felted wool would be the quickest approach, and I have a fair amount of wool.
I actually took out my 3-in-1 color tool when I was choosing which wools to use; everything but the green flower button cover actually fall into a particular color scheme. Can you figure it out? (The green button cover is close, but I'm not super-keen on it. May change it later.)
I just took the "quick and dirty" approach in sewing these pieces together. The beauty of felted wool is that it doesn't really fray, so you can just stitch that puppy together. Depending on the type of wool, though, it can be a little stretchy. You can see where the chartreuse pocket got a little polygram-esque rather than rectangular as I stitched it on. It's a looser weave so had more stretch to it. Still, it works. I just need to figure out how I want to close the two pockets on the front so they're more secure. There's a patch of Velcro on the top under the little flower button cover. I may add Velcro to the larger pocket; would need to do more of a flap thing on the stylus pocket. Pondering. But, to all intents and purposes, it's done.
These may be my last finishes for awhile...