Lost and Found

If you've been a reader of my blog, you know I love Hallowe'en.  Sooner or later, I was obviously going to felt a skull, right?  Of course!

I was inspired by this image shared on "All Things Halloween" on Facebook.  Sadly no credit was given for the image, so if you know who the artist is please let me know.  

My sister had given me some lovely, dyed pieces of felt that looked beautiful on their own so I wanted to use them in a way that would show them off.  This was the perfect project!

The dyed felt pieces are from Etsy seller Steph's Crafty Bits.  I cut the green and brown pieces to form the background and needle felted them to a plain piece of felt for stability.

  Isn't the green lovely, it's a forest without having to add anything extra!

I printed a second copy of the image to cut out the skull as a template...

From natural white prefelt purchased from Saira at Fibrecraft, I cut out the skull shape...

 and gently pulled away the eyes, etc..., as I needle felted it to the background.

A book on painting advised to always do the darkest parts first, so I did the darkest areas in black.

Using a Blue Faced Leicester fibre in shades of grey from The Spinning Spider, I filled in the dark spaces...

This took some time and trial and error, but it was amazing how the skull became more and more real!  I used a little very pale yellow to highlight parts of the bone that got a little more light.  Shadowing around the skull also helped.

Plus a little green on the teeth and chin and it was done!  

Then the foreground:  I liked the contrast of the little pink flowers so I added them in two shades with a few different colors of green. 

Framing forced me to cut away quite a bit from the sides but I had a lovely 8 x 10 frame (no glass) that I wanted to use.

And it was done!

Wow, what a thrill!  What a hush!  This was at a level I didn't think I was quite ready for so I'm very pleased with the result.  What a confidence booster!

Trying something new!

A few years ago I created Tairo the Unicorn and I've never been happy with the way his thighs looked, they seemed very "stuck on".  Last year I came across a book, Passion for Ribbonry by Camela Nitschke about creating flowers from ribbons and I always imagined a carousel horse with a Clematis growing up his/her leg, and so the two projects came together, to finish Tairo with a beautiful Clematis climbing his leg with gorgeous blooms concealing his joints.

So here's Tairo with the instructions from the book and the ribbons I collected.  I could not find a ribbon with dark edges and a lighter center but I did buy a mauvy pink that faded to a dark mauvy green across the width of the ribbon.  So instead of folding the ribbon in half (as per the instructions) I folded a double length and sewed 1 flower petal and 1 bud petal from each piece.

First, however, I created a vine growing up his leg, for this I used brown pipe cleaners:

 

 



After trying out a few petals, I cut as many as I would need and started sewing, 1 petal and 1 bud petal per piece.  Each folded piece is 1 3/4 inches long: 

 

 



 

Here you can see what the sewn pieces look like, then after cutting them apart, fraychecking the edges and then unfolding them.

 

 

Once I had a full set of 11 petals ready, I strung them together and used a fuzzy brown pipe cleaner for the center, creating this:



 



 

 

I used the green ribbon the same way, creating a full mature leaf and a young pale green leaf from each folded 2 1/2 inch piece.  The leaves were not sewn on the machine but rather a draw string was hand-sewn along the bottom edge (after fraychecking) and then pulled for the desired wrinkles.  Here you can also see the bud petals used to make small, developing flowers.

 

Looking good!!!  Each element is sewn in place with small, hidden stitches. 

 

 After a few adjustments and additions, Tairo was fully decorated with 3 flowers, 3 buds and lots of leaves!

And here is the "show side", as in a carousel horse.  I think it turned out really beautiful and it was fun! 

Please note that Tairo is adoptable, will be appearing at the Greater Toronto Doll Show on April 28th and he's sturdy enough to support the weight of a small doll, so a gentle faery would be a perfect companion! 

(If you would like scans of the 2 pages from the book emailed to you, email me!)