Life goes on

Can you tell I'm sulking up a storm? On Thursday I brought my Canon S100 to the service center only to be told it would take at least 2 WHOLE WEEKS before I get my camera back. See, it's a new model and parts are scarce. Ha ha. I'm terribly terribly disappointed in Canon. Out of all the Canon S100 produced, I had to pick the one that crapped out. And I've discovered MOST OF THE PICS I had taken for my next ePattern have been overexposed very likely by the lens fault. I am mentally strangling the technician who made my camera. But the service center is really nice though. And the boy who served me was cute.

The thing with cameras is once you've traded up, you just can't go back to your auto camera. I took some pics today of the stuff I made with my old Casio and I almost cried. waaaaahhhh.

Oh, I finally made the 10th felt flower-flower brooch for my next craft market. Yes, life can go on now. Like make a few bags!

Here are the 7 new flower-flower felt brooches I slaved over. I'm quite exhausted from colour matching. I tried my best to edit the images and this is my best effort.

These 3 took the longest time to make due to the long petals.

 These 2 are the easiest to make as the shape doesn't have steep curves.

I might have tried a little too hard with this one. For the center, I wanted to do a Catherine wheel.

 This is what a Catherine wheel looks like. It's from Mary Thomas's Dictionary of Embroidery Stitches.

For this rose, I may have overdone the center.

I've checked out Elegant Stitches by Judith Baker Montano from the library and it is such a great resource. I paid most attention to the straight stitches. I use a lot of straight stitches in my felt brooches and Judith really knows how to make these simple stitches interesting.

I also checked out Crazy Quilt Handbook and although it focuses on crazy quilting, it has a small section on the stitches.

I'm particularly drawn to the spider web and free-form trees stitches.

Bear has once again volunteered to model my 10 felt flower-flower brooches. I know it distressed one of you that I totally blinded Bear the last round so I've kindly left one eye unmaimed this time.

Now I have to go lie down as I'm suffering from an avalanche of headaches. We took MIL out for a Chinese banquet dinner yesterday and msg + milk are not my friends. Maybe I'll show you what we ate tomorrow? See ya.

Embroidered felt brooches

Remember this flower-flower felt brooch that I made here?

 I use the exact same template as my flower-flower applique.

Apart from the blue/red felt brooch, I made another one, very similar, just different in felt colour and stitches. The sad thing is I probably forgot to take a pic of it as I have hunted high and low. Anyway, both brooches were sold at my VivoCity craft market. When I first made the brooches, I did wonder if anyone would buy them. Now that both have been sold, I feel encouraged enough to make a few more.

The difficult part in making layered felt brooches is putting the colours together. I don't know if you know this but putting colours together is not my strong point. I have to see the colours together to know if it works. I can't visualize it. My son and hubs are gifted with colour matching skills. For the brooch on the right, I had no problem putting the 3 colours together. But the one on the left, I wanted the green/yellow to go with the pink but I couldn't find the right center. My son said the blue would work and he's right.

I have listed these 2 brooches on Etsy. Check them out HERE and HERE.

As always, Bear steps up to model my brooches.

Anyhoo, I got so into the brooch making mood that I made another one.

I was in the process of taking a pic of the third brooch when my Canon S100 died on me. Can you believe it? I almost had a heart attack. It hasn't even been 6 months. So I went back to my trusty Casio. The third brooch is orange and lilac. The colours didn't quite pop.

I think I would like to have at least 10 of these flower-flower felt brooches for my next craft market at the end of the month. I'm looking around for a book on crazy embroidery stitches because I think the embroidery style suits such brooches. These 2 books look good to me. 






I have read Judith Baker Montano's Embroidery books before and the stitching is amazing. If what you want is something FREE, this is a link to a free PDF on crazy stitchery. HERE. Search for "Book of Fancy Designs for Ornamenting Oriental Work". The pages are not in the right orientation so you need to print them to view them comfortably without straining your neck. It's in black and white so don't expect to be wowed. And while you're there, the Antique Pattern Library has loads of other free pdfs of very, very old books. You might want to have a look around.

Lastly, I wanted to show you a new isolated stitch I've not used before. It's called spider's web. It's the stitch I used in the center of the flower. You sew an odd number of straight stitches. Then you weave your thread over and under the straight stitches. I'm liking the look of raised stitches.

Linking to:

Ask anna
ninth street notions
get outta my head please

Skulls and bones niche

Ever since I wrote this post about my skulls and roses tees, I have been getting a little excited by the idea of always having some items with skulls and bones motif for sale. And I'm not talking about sometimes making one or two item if I feel like it. I'm talking about having a permanent skulls and bones niche. I'm thinking 5 items is a good figure to start with. What do you think? Will it work? Will it work? Or will I cry?

I dug out a skulls and bones beaded bag I made in 2007. Maybe the execution was not very good but I get a nice vibe from the beaded skull. No, I'm not going to go all crazy beading and embroidering. It's a lot easier to sell bags made from fabric print compared to something with embroidery.

Over the weekends at VivoCity, I chanced upon this skulls charm at one of the stalls at the craft market. Although I feel the beads are kinda in the way, overall, it's quite interesting. It's $5! This purchase has pleased me so much I want to go shopping for some skulls knick knacks to include in my pouches. A skulls zipper pull would be so cool.

My feeling is hubs will likely think it's not a good idea to have too many skulls related items for sale seeing how they're hard to sell and it's such a small market. So I won't tell him about it. Haha. shhhhh.