This is a school project about dogs. Hope you like it!
As you might have guessed, I have built a Concorde. Not to be mistaken with the German version (that was quite self destructive) of this magnificent plane. I have tried to make one in the past when I was new to Minecraft, but it was so horrifying that I can’t post it on this blog.
I know this hotel isn’t exactly like the other one, but it was as much as I could manage. You can find my inspiration for this build sitting right in Moab, Utah in fact.
Ever found yourself on Pinterest at 3 AM? I’m not saying this is a good thing, or even a planned event, but when the sleeping gods are not smiling on me I tend to find myself browsing through Pinterest in the small hours of the morning. And I’ll hand it to Pinterest, their search algorithm is pretty good.
Time to revisit the dogs. Last year the kids and I jumped into felt ornaments. My husband’s family are “dog people” so we thought it would be fun to make simple craft ornaments for everyone and try to replicate their furry friends as much as possible. These ornaments are easy and fun to put together. We used craft felt, stranded embroidery floss, holiday ribbon, small pom poms, rick rack and tiny jingle bells. The hardest part of the craft is cutting out the dog silhouettes, so I recommend a very good, sharp pair of scissors. Porter’s idea was the Santa hat and scarf, He also wanted little dog booties….we might have to give that a try this year. Use blanket stitch to piece the ornaments together. Easy and quick to put together, even Cora put a few of the dogs together, she was 6 at the time! Cute gifts for family and friends who are dog lovers!
Doves this time. And much more ornate. I decided to take the zentangle approach to embroidery to see if a completely covered, fully embroidered ornament would work. I’m pleased with the results. The second picture is the prototype I put together with just a simple running stitch and plain white wool felt. It took a couple of tries to get the shape of the bird I wanted and make sure everything lined up, but the plain version could easily be used on its own.
The embroidered dove is where the work came in. Metallic is not the easiest floss to work with, but the gold and white satin DMC floss I thought really brought out the festive look. The dove was beautiful with just gold and white, but also very wedding-esque. Red and green satin floss added the Holiday tone I was after, even added some holly leaves and berries to finish it off. Let me know your thoughts.
Three wool felt ornaments hand embroidered with unique designs using DMC Satin Floss and Metallic floss.
For this post I thought it might be fun to show a time lapse of design-to-finish so you can see how to create a hand embroidered felt elephant ornament. The process has been a discovery on what works well or less well.
First of all, opt for wool felt over craft felt. Craft felt is fine, and I tried it for the first few ornaments I made, but given then amount of effort involved with these little guys a nice wool felt is worth the extra few cents. I trace and draw my designs on Sulky Sticky Fabri-Solvy or Pellon Stick-N-Washaway, then stick in onto the felt. Embellish with an array of hand embroidery stitches and decorate liberally. 🙂 Satin DMC floss with metallic accents give it that “ornament” look. Originally I used craft felt and cotton floss, while the results were okay, I think the shiny options make it more holiday-esque. After embroidering, trim the shape with about an 1/8″ allowance outside of the profile outline. Soak in warm water for 15 minutes and rinse away any of the Sulky or Pellon that has not already dissolved. I recommend soaking the felt to be used for the back of the ornament as well since some shrinkage will occur and the felt will get a little stiff. I do not pre-shrink the felt for the front of the elephant prior to embroidery since my stitching tends to pull and pucker the felt. So far the felt seems to straighten out when it is soaked and shrinks. Finally, I use DMC perle cotton 5 for the outline with very small running stitches and thread DMC perle metallic gold or silver size 8 floss through the seam on the top before adding stuffing and sewing the ornament closed.
The ornaments are a lot of fun to make and a good creativity binge that doesn’t require commitment to a larger project.
Chase Handcraft 