Quick and Easy Embroidery Project- Basic Bottle Cap Pincushions

I found an absolutely fun, extremely quick, totally perfect canvas for quick, little, and (could be) easy, embroidery project! All thanks to a book I perused at my local B&N, Pretty Little Pincushions. The bottle cap pincushion, which inspired me most, came from Jen Segrest. (Her pincushions are on the cover of the Lark Book) I did a LOT of poking around her many links and sites and dove right in to give it a go! When I found this site, I knew we had many, many, many bottle caps. My dad is an avid, and I mean obsessively avid, “recycle-er” of bottles and cans. My mom drinks Joint Juice daily. A match made in pincushion embroidery heaven!

These little bottle cap pincushions are easily made out of felt, can be embellished in an infinite number of ways, are absolutely useful, and are so little you won’t get tired or bogged down with them as a project! They are just calling for your original embroidery designs, painted fabric ideas, silk ribbon embroidery, or any other inspirational designs and whims you would love to pour out on these little do-dads.

I find that I can do one as a ‘break’ from any other activity. Each is a vast canvas for stitchery practice, unlimited creative blossoming, or…well…let’s face it…Fun! Your life needs fun! Go ahead, have some fun!

Making up the little felt creatures are just as fun as embroidering on them. The felt is inexpensive, easy to sew (no fraying seams to mess with), color happy, versatile and very forgiving! I can choose from any threads available in my cool yarn, thread, wool, filament stash and find a zillion ways to attach them to the felt.

Here are just a few of my beginning pincushions.

Here is the whole gang of un-embroidered, destined to be masterpiece, pincushions. 😉 (I told you I had a lot of fun making them up!)

After making these basic ones, I had person request for a special pincushion. I will post that pincushion tomorrow, in a separate entry. *An–ti–ci–pa–tion…*

Original Embroidery Design-Yellow Faery (Fairy)

My husband and I are remodelling my parents’ bedroom and it will be tones of yellows, reds, plums and lace white. My mom loves faeries, dragons and flowers, so I thought this would be a great Mother’s Day gift, after framing, for her newly designed bedroom. (I will have to embroidery a Dragon separately for another holiday) 😉

I created the color palette and stitch design for this yellow faery embroidery. She uses various cotton embroidery flosses, silk embroidery floss (for her face), Kreinik filament, and silk embroidery ribbon in her design. I really am pleased with her and thought she’d make a great embroidery related banner her for my new blog. She’ll be the header for a while… 😉

The faery is from a Dover Book, Fairies and Elves Iron On Transfer Patterns. I didn’t use the actual transfer pattern in the book at the full size. I re-sized the transfer and used a light box to trace the new sized embroidery pattern onto the fabric with a HB pencil.

Her wings are stumpwork embroidery (Resource: A-Z of Stumpwork) formed from stainless steel wire and remnant gossamer fabric.

The material is a gorgeous piece of tie-dyed cotton from Wal Mart…yes, Wal Mart…I think it was $6/yd and I used only a 15×15 square of it. I moved her, the faery pattern, re-sized, all over the fabric design until I found a place that resembled a cloud-like form that could be supporting her and her flower. When I moved the design around, it found a spot where “if just fit in”. 😉

Learning to Design and Embroider- Creating Original Bougainvillea

I discovered hand embroidery projects by way of Inspirations Magazine and NeedleNThread.com, and after completing the first square of the quilt blocks, I thought it went well enough that I then wanted to create my own canvas, my own design, and chose my own colors. Nothing like jumping right into the fire!

The first thing I did was organize my embroidery thread onto bobbins. As I would the bobbins, endlessly, I put them into fishing tackle boxes. I find that the result is a fantastic palette, easy to access and easy to see.

I needed a subject. I pondered over this for a few days…always on the look out for something catchy, something unique, something exotic…then as I was staring out the window, my mind wandering over the many valleys and hills in my mind, I realized that for each of those days, I had been staring out the window…looking at a wild, but very happy and healthy, bougainvillea. I thought that the subject matter, wouldn’t attract many other people to want to stitch it, but, the other plants potted in front of it would be great for ribbon embroidery, and I realized that I would be stitching something original and unique for me, and perhaps someone else may be inspired from it to look out their window and stitch what they stare at.

I cut a 15×15 square of muslin and dug out my watercolors. I knew that I could do a few washes on the background to enhance the finished item, so I fixed a palette and painted some ‘splotchy’ background for my bougainvillea.

After painting the fabric, I had to ‘draw’ the pattern or picture that I wanted to stitch. Well, I really didn’t want to draw out all the details of this wild and crazy plant, so I basically made a few ‘shapes’ to transfer onto the material with pencil.

Once the fabric was dry and the pattern shapes penciled on, I had a great time going to my tackle boxes of embroidery floss to choose an original color palette. I pulled out some pinks, purples, greens…and several browns.

I went through several stitch ‘encyclopedias’ and collections to choose a few stitches to use while working up my bougainvillea. I favored turkey stitch, stem stitch, french knot, detached chain, detached fly, and couching.

It is a lot of fun to stitch this way! I made up everything as I went along.

As I finished up the background areas of the bougainvillea, I decided to add stumpwork to the foreground. (Resource: A-Z of Stumpwork) I padded and added silk embroidery ribbon for the main triangle facing the front center, (which still needs a hanging stem protruding from the area), and I added silk ribbon and perle cotton for the potted pink gingers and fern. I did paint the pots on another piece of fabric, stuffed them and appliqued them to the main fabric.

This is what it looks like so far:

Embroidery: Beginning An Original Design – Painting Fabric with Watercolors

Once I had the fabric samples marked off and the paper templates cut out, I could start painting the fabric. My whole focus with this was to simply getting to the paint and embroider part of the projects…instead of spending countless hours stuck in my journal and thinking about painting and embroidering…I’d actually be painting and embroidering!

I didn’t get a picture of the actual watercolor set up. Basically, you set your material on a workspace, set up your paints. (I used watercolor, but acrylics, fabric paints, or dyes work just as well.) Once all that is ready to go, you can paint with any techniques you prefer. I simply did what I felt like at the time and didn’t give it too much ‘thought’. I wanted the blocks to simply paint themselves instead of me over analyzing the process. (Which I can do a LOT of…)

I like to use watercolor wet in wet. I wet the fabric with a wash brush to give the watercolor a way to ‘run’ and blur into unusual unpredictable patterns and flow. I did some lifting of wet watercolor and some dry brushing as well. I also tried some graded washes. While painting, I used the templates to just cover over sections of the 4×6 fabric areas. That left a pattern of sorts either on the edges of the painted areas. I lifted the templates and moved them around and just played with the painted areas that were left to create some designs. When you paint your blocks, just have fun with it and see what turns up. I know that I may not use all the blocks, and even if I don’t ANY of the ones that I painted, Hey, At least I was Painting and not thinking about painting. ; )

I had the painted ‘bricks’ hanging on a small drying line, yes, stretched across my computer room-under construction-

Embroidery: Beginning An Original Design – Create Paint Templates

After marking off a 4×6 area on the material, I thought it would be great to have some various shapes to work with as paint templates. I cut some heavy art paper into 4×6 bricks so that the cutouts fit easily into the marked off space.

Then, I used scissors and cut ‘random’ shapes and designs out of the 4×6 paper bricks. I kept both the frame and the cutout to use as paint templates.