Working Out an Idea

A little bit of online window shopping lead me to The French Needle and some lovely rainbow-colored, felted wool flannel. It was a bit pricey so for days I went back and looked and looked again and each time decided it was just too much and what the heck was I going to do with it? For nearly a week, I revisited the site several times. Finally, an idea came to me on what to do with the flannel. Yay! Unfortunately for me, the idea hit me in the middle of the night when all I wanted was to sleep and the idea kept me up for nearly an hour while my brain “looked” at it from all angles. Sheesh!

I’m probably not allowed to do this but I stole the above photo from The French Needle because their photo was lovely. (I have no idea who took it or I would give them props.) Needless to say, I bought the stunningly gorgeous felted wool flannel! The flannel is even more luscious in person than the picture shows. The colors are gorgeous!

So now I have an idea but it’s only in my head and now I have to get it out! I knew I wanted it to be a wall hanging type of thing and I knew the basic design, but the size was still a mystery. So I started with this:

While I had ordered the rainbow flannel and it was supposed to arrive on an eagerly awaited Friday I was to be sadly disappointed. I was religiously checking the package’s tracking and was horrified to see that my package had arrived in my town’s post office at 4:12 am… and was promptly put on a truck to a neighboring town. After a very polite phone call to the PO, I had hopes it would show up in Saturday’s mail. It didn’t. By this point, I was seriously desperate to start my new project and thought, “Screw it!” and dug into some already-owned felt.

I guessed on how big to make it. This seemed like a good size.

It seemed to be a pretty good size until I tried to sew down the center panel and I realized it was going to take FOREVER to sew around the darn thing. Time to make things smaller!

A much more reasonable size and before I could start to stitch things down, the good stuff arrived in the mail!

And now that I look at it, I can see some of the pieces have shifted in the embroidering of them and now I can’t unsee it. It’s going to bug me until I either fix them or pitch the piece. Cripes. I swear, they were properly placed when I started. There’s a reason I use a fabric glue stick once I get everything in it’s proper place. (I feel like I should buy stock in fabric glue sticks.)

So this is where we are as of today. I’m excited about all the other color combinations I can make with all that beautiful flannel but I’m still working out how to finish this piece and future pieces. Wish me luck.