Bye bye birdie

My demented bird from the wool felt cushion was driving me mad - no matter how you squinted, the beak just looked wrong. So I unpicked my birdie and threw it away (could be a country song, right there) and kept doing flowers over the spot.

Should get in a bit more stitching as the rugby world cup goes along. I'm halfway through the radiotherapy now and I'm starting to go pink and burnt - I told the twelve-year-old Registrar today that I was beginning to burn and she peered at it and said "mmm, mild redness" ... mild! my bollocks. And feeling tired too - I left work early this afternoon and came home and slept for two hours. So now I feel groggy, tired and mildly red. Humph.

Still going with the wool felt

I haven't forgotten my adventure into wool felt - I've been picking away at it in random moments in front of the TV. It requires slightly more concentration than I normally have available while TV watching - hand quilting is much more brainless - so I don't always do it. But when watching something that only uses a tiny part of your brain (i.e. Midsomer Murders, which is getting more barking mad by the week) I applique merrily.

But not always with such good results. This is a bird with an experiment-gone-wrong beak transplant.

This is meant to be a sun. It looks like wrestling jellyfish.

Flowers not known to nature.

I've been writing off my design failures as "primitive" and bugger me, it really does look quite good in bulk! The flowers are jumbling up nicely - I just have to think of some little friends for the mutant bird and it will be a perfectly respectable cushion cover, if no-one looks too closely at any individual item.

Little felty flowers

My first little woolly things are flowers! It seems appropriate. This is great fun - I sort of think of a shape, then cut it out from a piece of felt, and sew it on. Colours are whatever I think is pretty, and threads are whatever I think might look good, and then I stick it on whatever bit of the grey stuff is closest.

I'm sure this would work out much better in the end if I had a design, and a plan, and a pattern, and put a bit of effort and thought into shapes or placement ... but I just can't bring myself to.

Next I'm going to do a little sun. I'm getting inspiration from the very clever people here - aren't these cute? They have pdf patterns but I don't use them, I just look at the picture and wing it. If I wanted to print off the pattern I'd have to walk ten metres to the other computer, and that's not going to happen. Not while Toddlers and Tiaras is on. There seems to be a lot of geographical overlap between mad-keen quilters and mad-keen pageant families. Coincidence?

Haven't forgotten the wool felt

I hadn't forgotten about the bundle of wool blend felt I ordered a couple of months ago ... in fact I've been picking it up and patting the layers now and again. I just thought that really I should finish the current hand sewing project (hexagons) before starting anything new. Which is sensible.

But then I had a little brain moment and remembered that somewhere, in a bag, in a cupboard, in a room, there were some dark grey bits of woollen fabric. My mother-in-law gave me some material years ago from her cupboard. There were all sorts in there but I was sure it included a few sizeable pieces of men's suiting.

So I made my poor long-suffering husband drag out bags from dark corners and sure enough; past the winter jackets, behind the bag of bras that don't fit, even past the wedding dress ... a whole big stripey bag of fabric scraps, including the dark grey wool. I could be completely wrong, but I have a feeling they're leftovers from suits or trousers that my father-in-law had made when they lived in Hong Kong.

All three feel like wool to me, but I thought I'd do the burn test just to make sure! I've always wanted to do this, it seems very scientific. Synthetics melt, cotton flames, wool smells like burnt feathers ... which all sounds very simple but my results were inconclusive. It burned rather than melted, and smelt like burnt hair, but there was a powdery residue that felt like melted plastic. So I'm scientifically saying it's a wool blend. That gives me a bet both way, and I'm going to use the lovely soft herringbone (in the middle) as a background for my wool felt embroidery thingy.

Felt!

I've long admired the folk art applique of Sue Spargo and those like her - it is colourful and free and interesting to look at. But I was intimidated ... I'm not an embroider and I don't know any fancy stitches or embellishment techniques. And some of the really cool stuff looks fearsomely complicated. But a few weeks ago I thought - bugger it, why don't I just try something simple and if it doesn't turn out it doesn't matter. So I ordered in some pieces of wool-blend felt.

25 colours from Feltorama. The wool blend isn't as nice as the pure wool, or the felted woven wool, but it's a fraction of the cost. If I get really into this I'll get some of the nice stuff.

I also bought some background - it looks quite grey in both the photo and real life but it's actually a khaki weft with white warp. I wanted something neutral and neither light nor dark. I'm going to make a 60 x 60 cm cushion cover with maybe flowers and stuff on it! At this stage I think I'll be sticking to blanket and running stitch but if I'm feeling adventurous I might branch out into feather stitch or something. I don't know how to do that but, frankly, how hard can be when I have the whole internet to teach me. The real question is - do I start now when I really want to, or do I be a good girl and finish the hexies first.