Madame On Felt

You know that I've got this slight obsession with polymer clay faces right? Yup. Well actually it's kinda strange because I have a little container full of the faces I've moulded thus far, all sitting there ready for action, to be part of creative endeavours and wondrous things. But then I get thingy about it and don't want to use them, like I'm some sort of weird, over protective parent or something. sheesh

Anyway, in saying all that, the other day I DID use one of my little people. I had a yearning to make another wool felt keyring having made one once before with a bit of embroidery on it, but this time I wanted to use a face.

I had another go at using bullion stitch for hair. I reckon it makes cool hair, a bit like ringlets. And I had more practice with scroll stitch around the edge in purple.


And Madame herself is attached by way of three holes I poked in the edges of her head before she was baked. I was a bit worried that the weight of her face would warp the shape of the keyring so I counter-weighted her with a polymer clay bead on the back. And equally handy was the fact that the bead has holes in it too, so I ran the stitches in between the holes in the two clay things, which has made everything nice and stable.


I tried something a bit different for the edge treatment this time. First I just did a whip stitch (I think that's what it's called, just ordinary stitching round and round the edge). But as I was doing it, I threaded a long silver bead on every second stitch. It was difficult to keep them all straight and even but regardless of that I quite like the look. And it's very nice and feely to run your fingers around the edge.


And on a complete change of subject, I thought I'd throw in a photo of our lime tree, which has obviously hit some untapped source of nutrition underground because it is absolutely dripping with blossom at the moment. It smells lovely.


And the old apricot tree has started blossoming too. We've had the apricot tree for about 25 years and it's been a legend, producing kilos and kilos of fantastic fruit. But the last 3 years it's done virtually nothing and Steve has tried all sorts of different ways to prune it to try and coax it back into fruiting life. Most of the branches are showing promise with spatterings of blossom, but here we have one smartarse overachiever, one scrawny little twiglike branch completely covered with flowers. We are watching with interest to see what results.