Flower Pin Cushion challenge and work in progress.

These are the drawings I made for The Flower Pin Cushion Challenge from my Challenge site. The Challenge was to make a pin cushion with a stylised/geometric/art nouveau design to it. The first one above is of a Love in a Mist flower.

I then went on to make some studies of various other flowers, foxglove, penstemon and aquilegia. I became quite interested as always by the division of a circle, I found myself looking at the back of the aquilegia and noticed how the petals are divided. I then made a simple pencil drawing but the final design ended up to look much more like the water lilies on my pond, so I went along with that as it seemed to work very well. Not absolutely satisfied with the end result but I am quite pleased with the colour considering that I don't usually like working with bright pinks. Strangely enough I am more pleased with the green around the pink which I added a little silk to as I felted it.

Work in Progress.

Ok, as you can see I am back to my circles. I love geometry!

Being still quite new to the embellisher I am still experimenting with it to see it's possibilities. The piece of felt below was made by using up scraps of mainly brown felt, felted onto a wool blanket that I dyed a nice shade of pink. I then felted some chiffon headscarf material on to the back of this which was a combination of blues and golds and pinks. The beauty of working this way, I feel is that I make a piece of felt and then not only does the work from behind give the piece some nice unifying colours but also once cut into the shapes I want to use, I find that I can then use both sides which are slightly different but that compliment each other, as I hope you will see by the smaller pieces I have placed over this one, see below.

I hope that you can see the subtle change from the front and back. The back is the chiffon material and it is the smaller piece. I have done some machine embroidery onto this fabric and purely by accident in a way the rayon which was in the bobbin which was a shiny cream thread inspired me to embroider with some silvery thread around the outside of the top circle. The lower, larger circle is not so distinct and has a bronze shiny rayon machine stitching on it.

Here is a close up so that you can make out the differences between the two layers.

It is going to be very much a layered piece with the material alternating from back to front being used.

Another close up, this time of the petal features.

I haven't got all the petals motifs finished yet but you can see the idea of how it will look when it is finished

Well, I can honestly say I am now working in a manner that I am happy with. I feel that I need to make a series of these. So I hope to post some more and I will place the finished article here when done. B.F.N Tricia