Friday, May 8, 2009

A Rare Occurrence

Bad wolf templateI embroidered the design on my little felted bag last night.
Nothing much, just some lettering.
You will, perhaps, not be surprised to hear that embroidery and needle point are skills I never picked up.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I admire the finished products, but I can't see myself having the patience to learn, improve my abilities, and finally finish a project.
In fact, the one piece of needle point I have in my house (a picture of Pooh and Piglet) I acquired by somehow conning a friend into doing for me.

Dumbing It Down
Knowing the activity I was embarking upon isn't a strong suit, I tried to make it as easy on myself as possible.
I used photoshop to design and print a little template for myself.
My brilliant idea was to just trace the letters.
My plan took an immediate turn for the worse as I didn't make a frame properly, so only the words printed and I had to wing cutting out the square.
BW start But I persevered.
I cut some of the excess paper off and pinned it to my bag.
Which is what you see in the top photo.
By the way, "Bad Wolf" is a reference to the Dr. Who TV show in its current incarnation from a couple seasons ago. If you don't understand, it would take too long to explain. (But that is also how long I've had the idea for this little bag!)
In the second picture you can see my amateurish (childish?) stitching in progress. It's a bit hard to tell with the purple yarn over the black ink, but you get the idea.
After all the stitching was done, I ripped the paper out.

Done Done!
Bad Wolf BagBefore the bag was worked and felted and almost done.
Now it is done done.
Removing the paper was another slight flaw in my cunning plan.
The paper was much sturdier than I was expecting. The yarn on the front got tugged up a bit and I had to pull the strands inside to tighten things up.
If you think the front looks bad, you should see the mess on the inside!
But it's not like I'm going to be putting small, loose things in this that will hook the floats, so I'm not worried about it.
It worked up rather quickly. I think the longest part was waiting for it to dry after felting it. I probably would have finished it sooner, if I hadn't lost Wednesday night to a stupid migraine.
Well, that my little adventure making my cute little bag. I'm rather pleased with it.
I also think a slightly larger one with a strap might make a nice little summer bag.
But I have too many other projects on the go to worry about that at the moment.
Speaking of other projects, after finishing the bag, I was about to work, oh, four rows on the Harf before it was bedtime.

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