A crafty Birthday gift! Embroidered felt birds

A crafty blog post

Every once in a while I like to do some embroidery needle crafts. Garment sewing is my true love but I do like to just create! One area that I enjoy is doing some embroidery. I have a pillow that is an embroidery WIP for a couple of years now!! However, this time I turned to the birds!

 

My granddaughter just turned 6 and she really enjoys handmade items. She loves to know that someone is making something for her and doing it with their own hands. When I make her clothes she knows that I make them with love and she takes joy when she wears them. She sees many people in her family and school creating. This is something that is an important family value. I grew up that way, my daughter grew up that way and now my granddaughter is growing up that way. It is lovely!

Due to the pandemic the options were limited for birthday celebrations- we came up with the idea of a socially distant picnic with our good friend Liz in Grant Park. V loves getting together with friends of all ages and was so happy to be having a picnic in the city.

For her 6^th birthday I decided to create for her 6 little birds that she could play with and enjoy. I did a google search and found this book- Folk Embroidered Felt Birds by Corinne Lapierre. I purchased my book from Nancy’s Notions and it was as a kit with a pack of very nice wool felt. You can also purchase directly from Corrine Lapierre’s website in the UK or from Amazon.

The templates or patterns are located in the back of the book but you will need to make copies to cut them out or use tracing paper to cut them out since they are layered and on both sides of the page.

Song thrush made up in purples

Robin

Modified Goldfinch- i made him double sided and added a 'breast gusset' to make him fatter.

I made 6 of the 20 birds -   Song Thrush, Blue Tit, Robin, Goldfinch, Puffin and Dove. I made a few changes. For the single sided hanging birds, I made them double sided and added legs. The directions were all very clear and worked great except for the Puffin. There seems to be a pattern piece missing and the directions were not as clear on this one. I saved him for last and just sort of made up the missing parts as I went along. SO if you get this great little book just don’t start with the puffin!!

L-R Robin, Dove, Song Thrush, Goldfinch, Puffin and Blue Tit

Each bird probably took about 6-8 hours to complete from start to finish depending on how many pieces and how much embroidery was needed.

Such joy and happiness in her smile!

Victoria really enjoyed opening these lovely little birds and I certainly enjoyed making them! I think that I will have to make some for myself J

Do you enjoy other crafts? I’d love to hear about it!

Happy Sewing and Happy Crafting!

 

Family Valentines craft night

Yesterday evening, after a wonderful dinner and dessert made by my wonderful hubby, we had a fun family craft night.

Rick 'antiquing' his glass.

Melissa came up with the idea of painting wine glasses for Valentines day. She picked up 2 inexpensive glasses for her and Dorian and I re-purposed 2 glasses from the china cabinet. I just happened to have a set of 2 left from a bigger set that is all broken now, so I used those for Rick and I to paint.

Gotta love Dorians face...

The paint was an enamel based paint for glass and wood that once painted can be either air cured for 21 days or cured in an oven heated to 325'. I opted for the air curing method, I just did not feel to comfortable putting wine glasses in my oven heated to 325', maybe it would have been fine but I don't know enough about it and did not want to ruin our project or be picking glass out of the bottom of the oven!

Dino's in love by Dorian

Polka dots and hearts by Steph

Grapes on the vine by Rick and squiggles and hearts by Melissa

It was a fun, inexpensive way to creatively spend the evening together with the family, After the wine glasses we hit the Wii for a while for a little 4-way racing in Maria Kart. Boy oh boy, I really am not so very good at some of those games! Very fun night :)

True loves kiss :)

not really a sewing project but a craft one! For all the guys out there!

This one is for my Dad!! I can just see him shaking his head the same way my husband did when he walked past my sewing room and saw what I was up too....

I decorated my fishing tackle box! hehe

Just wanted to make sure that no one would get mixed up and pick up the wrong one! I spent a lot of time picking out all the different 'things' that are inside of that box. Not quite sure what I was picking out... so I just sort of went with the pretty factor and wild guesses. Not sure Dad would approve of that either.... hehe

Top of the box, a little bling glued on, nice designs with dimensional paint and of course I had to do a fishy call!

Front view

Up close of my fish call. Do you think it will work???