Monday, June 16, 2014

Knowing your heart

The more time I spend making things the more certain I am that's what I want to do with my life. I want to make. In an ideal world it would support me and my family but until then I'll do it anyway. Every cut, needle stab, bruise incurred is a war wound I wear with pride. I close my eyes at night and I see pretty stitches or projects taking shape. It is my passion in this world.

Here's a few of the things I've been working on lately. The dragon is sadly all phone pictures so the quality might not be great but I wanted to document the progress as it develops.



 the arm will be added once everything else is finished, just before it goes in the frame, the idea being that it will hang over the frame itself. It was made using a wire armature and small quartz crystals for the claws. Everything was wrapped in fleece and will be most likely covered either completely or nearly so with stitches







 I created a netting to go over most of the body, mostly I was playing around with it but I also needed something to help coral the fuzz from the stuffing used to felt the body
 Various widths of cording to make the base of the tree. once it's all completely wrapped more texture will be added.

 Felting the body. For this I felted directly into the fabric, takes awhile but I love the look of it. Though I would suggest a more cotton based stuffing for this, they stuff I have on hand is a little slippery feeling and required being held to a flame to get the strays to go away as scissors just didn't cut it.
 The beginnings of the tree, you'll notice it's not blue here. I realized because of the use of a red pen (yes I know not my best idea) to draw the dragon I needed to hide the lines. Originally I had thought to just stitch all of it, and I still may. But I did cut up a shirt I wear to do the blue so probably going to have some of it show.
My original drawing, it's not going to turn out quite the same as this, but such is life and I'm okay with that.


I've also been working on some miniature dolls with the thought of selling the wee bits when I'm finished. I will for sure make and sell a few but they are quite time consuming (11 1/2 hours) so I have some other hopefully awesome plans for some of the wee darlings.





 the full sized version, I've found that designing patterns in miniature is a humongous pain in the ass.





 And some of the newest cross stitch patterns. All of which are in my shop







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