WOYWW 514 Embellishments for Slippers

I am sorry that people are still unable to see my photos. I am in the process of moving my blog over to Wordpress, and I have reposted this post on there, and you can see it here, and comment there if you like.

This week, on and off, I’ve been working on the embroidered embellishments for my new felt slippers.

When I bought them, my first thought was that they were crying out for embellishment a la Shosh!

I began by cutting out some flowers and leaves by hand, from my large stash of felt pieces. You can see the little paper patterns I made, bottom left by the scissors.

I wanted to cut a lot of small circles, and searched online for the best method for this. Most people recommended using dies but I haven’t got any small circles and wondered if I could use my circle punches instead. Nobody recommended this and said it wouldn’t work! I know from past experience, trying to cut a piece of Tyvek with a punch once, that it jammed the punch. Thinking about it, though, I thought that if I sandwiched each piece of felt between two layers of freezer paper and ironed it, this might make it firm enough to punch out, and it worked! Some of the pieces were a bit fluffy but it was a simple job to trim that off with small scissors.

You can see that I’ve also got some baking parchment out, to protect the iron or ironing board, and also some kitchen foil. I used the latter to sharpen the punches  after use.

A great success, wouldn’t you agree?

Finally, beginning the embroidery.

I made a few from a single layer of felt, and to embroider these, pinned them to a piece of medium weight interfacing which I trimmed off afterwards. For the multi-layered ones I didn’t bother with this.

I am having such fun doing these!

Health Update

This afternoon I have got my appointment with Mr. Daniels, the colorectal surgeon in Exeter, to whom I have been referred by Mr. Pullan, my surgeon at Torbay. I’ll let you know how I got on afterwards. He will decide whether I need further surgery to repair my parastomal hernia, and if so, what is the best way forward.

We are going over early so we can have lunch out together first. My hubby did a reccy of the hospital today while he was in Exeter, and knows where to drop me off for the closest access to the outpatient clinic, which is going to save a lot of time tomorrow.

Blog

As you know from my previous posts, I’ve been having a lot of problems recently with photos on my blog, and it’s just added to my general disillusion with Google. I’ve been on the forum where there has been a discussion going on over the problems Open Live Writer (the software I use for composing my blogs) has been having with Google. Google has changed something and OLW is no longer compatible unless you use a workaround to get photos to publish on your blog, which is a pain. The experts on this open source application have been working hard but realise that what Google has done has made it impossible to make OLW work as it used to. Several people on the forum were saying they were suspicious that eventually Google would pull he plug on Blogger altogether; some decided to move over to Wordpress, so I started to give this some thought myself.

In the past, I’ve always been put off because I didn’t like the look of Wordpress, and thought it was all too much work anyway, but having investigated it in more depth, I find that it is more customisable than I’d realised, and a far more professional platform with a lot more versatility. I have decided to go for the paid version (and managed to get a hefty discount from someone whose Youtube tutorials I have been following) and it’s not really too expensive. I also got a book on Amazon and am working my way through that. It’s taking a long time and I’m covering a lot of new ground and feeling my way with computing stuff I’ve never done before, but I’m getting there gradually.

I have heard that transferring all the content from a Blogger blog over to Wordpress doesn’t always work that well, so I’ve decided just to start the new blog, but to keep the old one up with links between the two. It’s a good opportunity to do some housekeeping anyway. I shall continue to work on replacing the missing photos on this current blog so that it is complete.

The new blog isn’t ready for use yet, but hopefully by next week I shall be on my new blog! I’m now quite excited about it, and once I’ve finished putting all this work into it, it should be a much smoother experience. Once I am using it, it will obviously continue to be a work in progress as I discover more refinements.

The more time I spend on this, the more I realise how clunky Blogger is, and I think I shall be glad in the end that I took courage in both hands and went for this!

I would be very interested to hear the experiences of anyone else reading this, who uses Wordpress – which version they use (.com or .org), and their experiences setting it up.

No kitty photos this week – they’ve been doing the usual stuff, sleeping, eating, and playing in the garden under my hubby’s watchful eye.

Here’s a kitty funny for you.

WOYWW 513 Share, Foot and Mouth

Edit:  I am afraid I am still having problems with photos. No need to comment if you can’t see them. I am working on the problem and hopefully you will be able to see at least some of them. I can get them to appear, but they disappear again…

Share

I think I may have sorted the problem of my non-appearing photos – I had tried viewing my blog after logging out of my Google account and lo and behold, the photos were no longer visible to me along with everyone else, and since they were visible when I was logged in, I thought long and hard about that and wondered if it was a “share” issue on Google Photos. After making them “shared,” I logged out again and yes, they were visible to me. So please let me know if they are visible this week, and if they are, please scroll back to last week’s posts and you should be able to see the photos there as well.

As for all my disappearing photos since the demise of Google+, I am trying to work on two posts per day on average, and so far, working backwards, I have got back to June of last year, so it’s not going too badly.

Foot

Well, at least, footwear.

When we went shopping in Totnes last week I bought some gorgeous new felt slippers with really fun tops with felt balls on them.

They are quirky and fun and everybody says they are very “me”! My first thought was what fun it would be to embellish them! Having done my striped scarf with embroidered felt balls and other embellishments:

I thought I could do something similar with the slippers.

I have started cutting out some simple flower and leaf shapes from my large stash of felt.

Unlike with the scarf, I want the flowers and leaves to be flush with the surface of the slippers, rather than being 3-D. I am planning to do some wool embroidery on them and then stitch them to the slippers, and maybe add some embroidered stems, depending on how they look. The felt balls dangling from the tops of the slippers will have embroidery added to them.

Next time we go to Totnes I shall have to take the slippers back to the shop where I got them and show them what I’ve done!!

Mouth

Not so pleasant. I’d had the permanent filling put in my cracked wisdom tooth last Thursday and all was well, although it was a bit painful on and off when I bit down on it. My hubby said this was normal and he often got this for a few days after having had a filling (he has far more than I do so his is the voice of experience). It was pretty bad on Sunday and I was worried about it. Then at tea time on Sunday I thought part of another filling had broken off so my hubby rang on Monday and made an appointment for me for yesterday lunch time.

When I got there the dentist agreed with my hubby about teeth often being a bit sore for a few days afterwards, and then he looked at the other tooth and said the whole filling had come out! He fixed it then and there but it was a lot worse than the wisdom tooth one and the whole thing was pretty stressful. I had loads of local anaesthetic and my mouth didn’t come back to normal until tea time, and it’s been hurting since then, even though it didn’t hurt after the old filling came out. Hopefully it will settle down in a few days. I do hate going to the dentist and consider I’ve had more than my “fill” (sorreee) of it recently!

Our dentist is so lovely – he’s really friendly and knows what a wimp I am and always tries to put me at my ease (impossible) but we usually manage to have quite a laugh once the horrid part is done! He was very amused once when I told him I’d rather have 6 months of chemo than come and see him! Today he said everybody hated him and he had no friends because he was a dentist (which I don’t believe as he’s really nice and friendly!) and he said it was on a par with traffic wardens and tax inspectors. He then asked me, “What do you call 80 lawyers at the bottom of the sea?” I hadn’t a clue. Answer: “A good start.” Lol!!! (I have to agree – they charged us an arm and a leg, and possibly a mouthful of teeth, to wind up Mum’s estate… and it took them over a year.)

Anyway, I hope I don’t have any more tooth problems from now on.

Hospital appointment next Wednesday

I am going to see Mr. Daniels, another colorectal surgeon, at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital (RD&E) next week, having been referred by Mr. Pullan, my surgeon at Torbay. He wanted a second opinion on what he calls my “intractable” parastomal hernia, and depending on what Mr. Daniels has to say on the matter, I may need further surgery. I shall be very interested to hear his opinion about it.

Kitties

Lily and Ruby haven’t been doing anything spectacular recently apart from the usual sleeping, eating, the odd tiff, a fair bit of chasing each other around the house – thundering paws above our heads – whoever said cats were silent on their feet? We’ve always had elephants! They’ve been out most days and seem safe without constant supervision now my hubby has fixed the defences, but we don’t let them out unless he’s around, just in case. They have been moulting their winter coats and getting a few fur balls (fluffy Lily especially) and very, very demanding at feeding times!

No new photos recently so here’s one of their baby ones, just to remind you how dinky they were. 5 weeks old, the first time we saw them, the day we claimed them for our own. We got them at 9 weeks, and my goodness, it was hard having to wait those few weeks for them.

Ruby on the left of the picture, Lily on the right. (My hubby in the middle!) I can’t believe how tiny they were – they are really substantial now – great hulking girlies!

Finally, a cat funny for you.

Have a great week, everybody.

WOYWW 502–Scarf Embellishing

I know we always say this, but I can’t believe yet another week has passed… Half way through January already!

Remember last year I was working on some embellishments for the striped scarf I had knitted? I decided it was high time I finished that project so over the past few days I’ve been working on making the fringe and adding the felt and crochet embellishments. So far I have completed one end, and this is the result.

The other side.

Detail of fringe. You can see that I have incorporated the felt balls I made with crochet chains. I had made some white balls which I didn’t think I would use but in the end I decided to use them, and I added a bit of embroidery on them with wool scraps.

Detail of some of the embellishments.

Embellishments and fringe.

Closer detail shots of the fringe.

I also attached a few crochet chains further up the scarf, with felt flowers and leaves attached, and the whole effect has been to soften the bottom edge of the scarf.

The little blob on the end of each felt ball on the fringe is a crochet chain loop, through which I am planning to attach a tassel. If I don’t like the tassels I can always take them off again – the little loops look quite nice on their own!

Now all I’ve got to do is repeat the process on the other end.

Kitties

They’ve both been using the cat tree again lately, which is good. I was beginning to think I’d bought a large expensive piece of junk.

Lily exposing her tummy.

We had another session with them in the garden the other day and Lily was quite happy playing and just sniffing at things and running around, but Ruby spent the whole time going round the edge looking for ways to escape. We had to keep her under close supervision the whole time. We took them out in the late afternoon when they were hungry, in the hope that this would get Ruby in, but we had a terrible job with her, and she wouldn’t even be enticed with Dreamies. In the end I fetched the birdie toy (you can just see it in the above photo) and this proved irresistible, and after a while my hubby managed to get her in.

We got Lily in first, and I shut her in the house, out of the kitchen. I went through to check on her because she was crying, and she was sitting up on the flat kitchen windowsill looking out, desperate to know where her sister was.

As soon as we got Ruby in, I chased her into the house and she went into the flat. Lily didn’t see her at first but still went on gazing out of the window, and I called her and said “Ruby’s here!” and she immediately leapt down and went straight to her and kissed her – she was all over her and her relief and love were palpable! It was sweet to watch, and I wished I’d had the camera handy. She really worries about Ruby, but we wish she would just tell her to behave and be done with it – but we all know that Ruby never listens to anybody!!

This is what I’m always threatening Ruby with, when she’s naughty!!

Other news

No sourdough this week, but I made ordinary seed bread in the bread maker. I also did a roast chicken on Saturday which was delicious, with lots of nice cold meat to follow (easy meals!) but I was so wiped out on Sunday after all that effort that I spent most of Sunday morning in bed while my hubby went off to church on his own!

I’ve not been too well this past week, with a lot of fatigue and headaches so I’ve been trying to rest as much as possible, and have also been working hard on sessions for my Bible study group which resumes again tomorrow night. I’ve been learning a lot recently and designing new sessions and am excited to share what I have learnt with the group. The sitting room is a mess and will definitely need to be tidied up before the evening!

We’ve got the plumber and the roofer coming at the end of the week – the former to service the boiler and check out a possible leak in the downstairs loo which always seems to be damp, and also to fix my boiling water tap that has been leaking for ages, and recently caused a major flood in the kitchen. The roofer is coming to fix a leak in the flashing on the lean-to at the back which is causing some dampness on the wall. Oh the joys of living in damp old Devon… It’s much damper by the coast than where we used to live, further inland. Always something to fix on older houses, isn’t there. Hopefully none of these jobs will prove major.

Completion of the Mystery Project–Part 4–Purple Heart and Card

The final one of the three hanging hearts was the purple one, for my friend’s birthday, and I gave it to her a couple of days ago, together with a matching birthday card.

Some time ago she had asked me to make her something like this, and at the same time she gave me some pieces of wallpaper she’d got when she was deciding how to decorate her room. I decided to use bits from these for this project.

For the background for this heart, I cut a piece of music to fit in the recess of the frame – my friend is a musician, and she had got me a whole lot of old music from someone she knows, and I’ve had this a while now, ready for incorporating into art projects.

The particular piece I used was from the back of one of the books of music, showing samples of other books – the music was reduced in size and just perfect for this little frame.

I selected a few of the stems from one of the wallpaper pieces and fussy-cut them out to overlay on top of the music piece.

The stems stuck down and the ends trimmed.

The music paper had a slightly greenish tinge to it, so I enhanced this by distressing the edges with some Pine Needles Distress Ink to start with.

To this I added some Pumice Stone and Hickory Smoke Distress Inks to dull it down a little.

The music piece with its stems in place in the heart frame.

I worked on the back as before, packing out the recess in the frame with corrugated cardboard stuck down with masking tape, and making a back piece traced around the outside of the heart onto a piece of cardboard. I distressed the edges with Pine Needles and Pumice Stone Distress Inks.

Pumice Stone is a very useful colour. It’s not particularly inspiring on its own on a white background, but for dulling down other colours, it’s perfect.

These are the purple roses that I made for this frame, laid on a couple of the wallpaper pieces as a background.

Finally, here they are on the dark rose wallpaper. I really liked the spray of flowers on this paper and decided to use it for her birthday card (see below).

Here are the roses stuck onto the heart frame with hot glue. I have laid a few small flower pieces in place as I felt it needed something extra.

Inking the small flower pieces, using Seedless Preserves Distress Stain. On some of them, I also added a little Brushed Pewter Distress Stain for a bit of variety.

I made some die-cut leaves and coloured them with Pine Needles and Forest Moss Distress Stains. I hand-embossed these when they were dry.

Here are the finished leaves with the tiny purple flowers. The colour has come out a bit too bright on this black leather background! The true colour can be seen in the next photo.

Here is the finished heart frame with some of the leaves added, also stuck down with hot glue, first of all against the stems wallpaper as a background:

and on another of the wallpaper pieces for a slightly different effect.

The Birthday Card

I wanted this to co-ordinate with the heart frame, and I particularly loved the dark rose wallpaper and decided to use this for the card.

I selected the area with a complete flower spray, and also cut out some of the rose leaves from elsewhere on the piece. These didn’t need embossing because they were slightly curled, and there was shading in the printing of the leaves. I cut the piece with the floral spray to the correct size to mat and layer onto a black cardstock base.

The bottom left hand corner of the piece had part of a very large rose on it, which I didn’t want, so I cut a piece of background from the wallpaper to cover it, and then found a small paper doiley in my stash, which I inked with Worn Lipstick, Pumice Stone and Hickory Smoke Distress Inks, gradually building up the colour with Inkylicious Ink Dusters until I’d got the colour right to co-ordinate with the background piece. I trimmed off the excess so that it would fit over the corner of the piece.

The doiley glued in place over the piece of wallpaper background. Much better without that large rose.

Matting the piece onto the black card base. You can see that there are some leaves printed on the top edge – I was originally going to cut these off but decided against it. I love the “crazy paving” texture of the background of the wallpaper, which is slightly shiny.

The next step was to glue on the leaves. I did a mock-up to decide where to place the die-cut and embossed leaves and stuck those down first. I took the rose leaves cut from the wallpaper and filled the backs with quite a bit of hot glue so that they would retain their slight curve, and let them cool till set. I wanted the leaves to have some dimension on the card and not just be glued down flat, but the paper was fairly flimsy, so the hot glue had the effect of strengthening them considerably.

I placed them onto the card and heated them with my heat gun in order to soften the hot glue again and hold them in place.

Unfortunately this had the effect of warping the whole card, so it had to endure Shoshi’s Heavy Books Treatment overnight! It was much better in the morning.

I made a liner for the inside from some pink cardstock which I distressed with Dusty Concord Distress Ink, and stamped the sentiment with the same Distress Ink. I highlighted this with a pearlescent gel pen but this doesn’t show on the photo.

The completed card, on one of the wallpaper pieces as a background. I added a gold peel-off sentiment.

Here it is, with the purple hanging heart ornament which was her birthday present.

This completes the mystery project of three hanging heart ornaments and a birthday card. I really like the colour schemes and the wallpaper pieces, and have enough left of these, and some of the flowers (I used all the purple flowers) to alter the little frames my hubby gave me recently.

They are a bit bigger than the small heart frames, so I’ll have a bit more space to play with. Watch this space.

I have enjoyed working with the wallpaper pieces. I have a couple of old wallpaper sample books and really should start using these. They can make a good starting point for many projects, and they have lovely designs, colours and textures which can be enhanced by the addition of embellishments. Must do more of this!