Brooches, brooches, brooches

Another family birthday is looming, now it's my husband's – tomorrow! The present is half-finished, still some work to be done. It is meant to be a surprise, so everything I can say now is that it is made of fabric and felt. It's not going to be easy to finish, since it's Sunday today, and everybody is home. I think I will enlist the childeren's help – to raise alarm if he is coming into the room. After the finished «product» is officially unveiled tomorrow morning during the celebrative breakfast (croissants, as we do for every birthday in our family), I'll post the photos here.

I've been watching Etsy Success videos while crafting, and the most frequent advice to improve the sales is to add more items to the shop. So I decided to make a stock of my most popular flower brooches: 

They are available to buy from the shop.

Still more to cut and sew. I am also trying new colour combinations: 

A month ago I had my first experience of selling at a crafts fair. It was terrifying, I was so nervous! As probably with anything that one does for the first time, it was far from a smashing success. But luckily, it was a small local crafts fair – perfect for practice, I think.  I made lots of girly brooches for that fair, and I just realized that they never made it to the blog. So here they are:

Most of them are now available from my shop.

Yesterday I asked my girls if they would like to be models for the owl and girly brooches. They were thrilled! So one day soon we'll organize a photoshoot – looking forward to that.

Doorstop "Poppy cottage"

The party weekend went well, everyone seemed to have enjoyed it, especially the birthday girl. She received a crafts kit as a present – to sew little bags and purses out of foam sheets. With the help of her sister, all the projects were done in a couple of hours. The next thing I saw was them carefully arranging and taking pictures of each of the pieces they made. I am really happy they are picking up crafts skills – whatever they do in life, it's very satisfying to make things with your own hands!

Now back to my unfinished projects. A friend of mine asked me to make a doorstop for her in a shape of a house. The house was to be with poppies, to match her favourite tea set.

I started with cutting out and machine-stitching together «the walls» and «the floor». 

 After that it was the time for the windows and the door. I really enjoyed making them! I tried different colours of felt for what would be the inside of the house as seen through the window. Black didn't look good, light grey also didn't really create the right impression, so I settled on mousy-grey. Next layer - white curtains, and on top of them – brown window frame, machine-stitched to keep everything in place. The door was made as a real door would be assembled from wooden planks, except instead of wood and nails  I used  strips of brown felt and machine-stitching.

 

Then, of course, there was the turn for poppies: the flowers and leaves were cut out of felt and glued onto the walls,  and the stems were embroidered with a chain stitch. 

Next – the inside. I looked for the cheapest clean sand to buy in reasonable quantities, and the best price I found was from Tesco - £2.26 for 10 kg. The sand in a bag was wet, so it took several days for it to dry before I could place the fabric bag with sand into the doorstop.

Then the roof trouble began. I made it by stitching four triangles of brown felt into the pyramid shape – that didn't take long. But then I couldn't figure out how to attach it to the walls. I thought and thought about it, and looked at it, and turned it this way and that way...

And so the house sat on my table for weeks, waiting for my engineering eureka moment.

This is a lesson I've learnt from several of my previous projects: it's better to let it sit and wait for the right technical solution, then to rush and finish it in a way I am not entirely happy with. 

Finally it struck me (luckily, it always does, eventually!). So today I cut out an additional part for the roof, stitched everything together, stuffed it, and voila – it's finished! 

I am considering using this process to make my first proper tutorial, with patterns and photos of the process, so any feedback on how useful this would be is very welcome!

Large flower brooches

These were made a while ago, they now belong to my girls. Large felt flowers with a covered button in the middle, diameter 15 cm.