This years books

Read, almost read, half read and not yet read

The problem ...

with  trying to wring every last bit of goodness out of life, is it leaves you exhausted.

Hearts are flowers

Last one for the night. Just been messing about with some diddy hearts and came up with this.  Still waiting to be stitched (some stems and around the outline) and I think I will make it into a card.

Guess I better go tidy up the devastation I've caused now!

Now for the fiddly bit

Next I had to remove the backing paper from the trunk and each leaf - time consuming and fiddly but part of the process.  I then ironed everything into place using a dry tea towel between the design and iron to stop the pieces from sticking to the bottom of the iron.   I tentatively pulled the tea towel back sure that I had misplaced some leaves, but thankfully everything was where it was supposed to be.

So, now I have my design on my backing material. 

Time to get the sewing machine out!

Change of colour

I wasn't happy with the darker trunk so decided on a pink one instead.

I cut out a large square of white cotton material for my background piece then spent a while arranging the leaves until I was happy that it looked fairly balanced.  I've found that taking a photo of something in progress reveals it's flaws more than just relying on my eye so there was a bit of tweaking until I was happy with the layout. Needless to say I ended up taking loads of snaps as well. 

2 hours later ...

Thought I would try another tree similar to the one I made last year but different colours.  Step one was to draw and cut out some trunk and leaf templates then trace them onto the back of some Fus-a-Web.    I'd already attempted to do each leaf seperately but found the webbing was flaking off.  Second attempt was to trace 10 leaves and cut out the whole block, iron it onto the material then cut the leaves out once they were already fused to the webbing.  This worked much better!!

I then laid the bits out on my ironing board to get an idea of how it would look.

Pinks.

Time for a new project.