My very first own design

I have finished my first own creation and I am extremely happy!
After working in IT for so many years and being apart from my creative side, I was not sure I was going to be able to wake it up again! But it seems I could.

I have designed 3 letters (B I A) with the name of a beautiful baby girl recently born in The Netherlands. I will be giving this present to her mom next week and I am looking forward her feedback!

I loved to work on it and it has so many little details! I am sure that with other colors it would also look quite good. Don't you think?

What should I do now? Should I design the entire alphabet? ....
I would like to receive your feedback too! Please leave your comment and tell me what you like or dislike about it. Thanks!

Learning to embroider

The world of embroidery is much wider than I had ever thought.
There are so many amazing stitches to play with! At this moment I have my 2 favorites, but I might update this post later.  They are:

1) Sarah´s Hand Embroidery Tutorials - http://www.embroidery.rocksea.org/stitch/
2) Materialistic, a blog about stitching - http://kellyfletcher.blogspot.nl/p/stitch-directory.html

I just wanted to write this down here so I do not loose the links to those amazing sites!

By the way, autumn has started in Holland and I love it! I also makes me realize that my youngest son will soon be 1 year old. Time flies! 

Stitches

I am getting familiar with the different type of stitches that can be used with felt. I wasn't aware that the stitching world could be so fascinating! While surfing the web I found this adorable picture in Pinterest but I have not been able to link to the original photo on Flickr. I know that the author's name is Kirsty, but that's all I know (I hope she does not mind I used her beautiful stitches here).

Anyways, this is a very beautiful picture of different embrodery stitches. I want to do this too!

Taking it to the next level

Today I wanted to create a pattern to make strawberries in 3 different ways.
1) A whole strawberry
2) Half a strawberry
3) A strawberry slice

From the 3 above the 1st one is the easiest one, and I have already made 2 and they look quite OK to be my first strawberries and the second thing I ever made with felt...

While I was preparing the pattern for the strawberries in 3 ways I felt tempted to look -again- to the wonderful images of the strawberries and cakes made by japanese artist Ruko. This is a link to her 'food' gallery (http://homepage2.nifty.com/ruko/frame/gallery_top_frame.html) and it's truly amazing what she makes.

So I spent the whole night looking at her designs instead of making my very own strawberries. And I finally decided to buy a book of her creations to get my skills to the next level.  A 2nd hand copy of "Ruko's original sweets made of felt" is coming my way from Japan during the following weeks. I can't wait!

My first real project: vertical name banner

Inspired in a present we got some years ago when our eldest child was born, I designed and made this very different "felt name banner" for our little new neighbour next door:

I think I will write a tutorial really soon as I want to make another one for my youngest son too.

Isn't it cute?