Sometimes, you just have to step outside your comfort zone. When I learned about Vickie Howell’s Purple Stitch Project to benefit babies, children and teens with epilepsy, I wanted to contribute.
One goal of the project is for people who knit, crochet, or sew to make purple (the epilepsy awareness color) gifts for kids with seizure disorders. To do this, Purple Stitch Project has teamed up with Craftsy to be able to offer free patterns and project ideas for volunteers to work from.
Reading about the project, I knew I wanted to make a purple stuffie of some sort. Of course, since it is a “stitching” project, I’m at a severe disadvantage.
In fact, a couple of months ago, I would have been at a loss. But that, as we all know, was BF… “Before Felt”.
Still, being a felt novice, I wasn’t 100% comfortable with making a stuffie… even out of the All-Forgiving-Felt.
I created a pattern and then followed my own pattern to make a stuffie.
Then I tore up that pattern and started over. A couple of failed patterns later, I settled on this one:
I’ll be shipping my imperfect kitty off to the Purple Stitch Project later this week.
If you’d like to join the project and stitch a kitty, the pattern is available (as a PDF file) for download both here and on Craftsy.com.
When you discover that your felt badge swap partner is a Dr. Who fan, there’s really only one thing to do: Exterminate!
Okay, so maybe felt isn’t the most intimidating medium for a bubbling lump of hate, but all the other felt badges are looking nervous. Really, really nervous.
And yes, I know — my embroidery skills are… well… I need more practice.
Download the Dalek pattern (PDF file).
FREE PATTERN:Yes, you can make your own Dalek felt badge with this free pattern. If you’ve never made a felt badge before, you might want to try your hand at one or two simpler patterns — there’s a whole lot of evil in this one.
The pattern is a PDF file which requires the free Adobe PDF reader.
And before you ask, the Dalek bumps are made from wee little (3mm) brads from the Eyelet Outlet.
That wave has now crashed on the shore and I decided that more practice was needed prior to working on my swap badges.
What better felting practice than to give Frankie his bride.
I made the large (4″) bride first and then made a couple of changes to the pattern. One change was to give the bride a more flattering décolletage and the other change was to the bouquet. The bouquet in the large bride was done by needle felting bits of pink felt — I didn’t like the lack of definition, so in the smaller bride (2.5″), the bouquet is made of french knots (thank you, youtube tutorial).
I also learned something about needle felting. Those numbers assigned to the needles (e.g., 38T, 36S, 42T)? They actually mean something, lol. After breaking the one 40T needle I had, I switched to a larger needle and it just chewed the felt to bits. I rushed off to etsy and purchased some 42T needles from Red Barn Farm — much better results.
Here are some action shots from when I was putting the small bride together. Each pic is of the pieces I felted before adding the next layer.
