I finally did manage to finish something, though. . . this little flower design on a pre-made mini-denim bag. These bags are available for just a few dollars at our local Hobby Lobby, and I'd been thinking about stitching on them for while now.
I started working on this sometime last fall as a possible EGA program this year. Fairly quickly, though, I realized that working ALL those woven petals got really tedious really quickly. And that is not a good thing for a program designed for a variety of stitchers with a variety of interests. So off it went into the mountainous UFO pile.
A couple of weeks ago, I pulled it out again -- all that was left was half of one flower and the bigger leaf, so it was just a matter of sitting down and finishing it off.
This project was inspired by Pat Trott's Three Dimensional Embroidery Stitches book and by a daisy wreath project designed by Manya at Humming Needles.
The main technique is a woven picot leaf technique used to make the white daisy petals.
The photo shows the instructions for this in Pat's book.
This creates shapes that are only attached along the one short side, as shown in this picture. Since the little bag is an item that will get fairly hard use, I went back and tacked the petals down. . . . but they still retain a nice dimensional feel.
The flower centers are created by working French knots in two different yellows on a small piece of muslin. After doing the embroidery, the little round piece is cut out with a small fabric margin, you run a row of running stitches along the outer edge, and gather the margin to the back, then stitch the whole thing down onto the fabric. You can see the yellow center piece before it's applied in the photo above, and here it's being tacked down.
I also liked the spiky little leaves, which are stitched in fly stitch. I thought it worked really well for the smaller leaf. . . but doing the larger one got tricky.
Although this didn't work out for an EGA group project, I'm pleased with the results. I'm thinking about putting a piece or two of Velcro as closures.. . . or possibly a button and loop closure. I rarely am organized enough to change out purses to match my outfits, but I think this little bag would work well as a mini pocket book in a vacation type situation or as a stitching project bag for a small project.
