A Burst of Sunshine...

Ok, so it is the wrong colour, but I think I can be forgiven as it is so long since I have seen the sun. Thankfully, it has put in an appearance the last couple of days, which has been lovely! I much prefer cold, crisp, sunny dog walks to all the milder, greyer weather we have had!

I have been busy needle felting. I had a go with my daughter's hand-held felting needles, which are better for fine work than my embellishing machine, but I decided that the machine is quicker and makes a firmer felt. I think I am just too impatient to do it by hand!

This brooch can be found in my Etsy shop and I will be listing a couple more over the next day or two.

As Promised...almost!

Ok, so it isn't tomorrow as promised, but yesterday seemed to disappear, so I will have to make do with posting today!!!

Sorry, this picture is a bit blurry, but it shows the fairy houses appliqued in place, windows and doors have been embroidered on and the whole piece has been layered with wadding, backed and tacked! The tacking is quite dense as I am going to machine quilt this piece and add text, so I don't want the layers to shift at all.

I began to quilt it yesterday, but today I have been distracted by needle felting. I want to add some brooches to my Etsy shop, like the blue one on the right of my blog - I'll let you know when they are done.

We had a lovely walk through the frost this morning and the dog had a wonderful time leaping around with lots of other dogs of all shapes and sizes-he even made friends with another little schnauzer. He is so tired now that he is splayed on the floor,looking for all the world as though he has been dropped from a great height!

Happy Sunday!

Dotty About Hexagons

I do love making traditional patchwork hexagons. I love the process; drawing paper templates, pinning them to the fabric, cutting around the template, folding in the seam allowance and tacking and finally stitching them together with tiny little stitches.

The shapes grow and I feel connected to the past, all those thousands of fingers that have carried out the same actions. I find it very soothing.

I love how these brooches have come out- thay have given me another good use for my gorgeous buttons!

One or two will be appearing in my EtsyShop over the next couple of days.

I Heart Buttons

As promised yesterday, another denim corsage, which I will be adding to my Etsy shop.

Beautiful Buttons

I showed you my lovely buttons from oritdotan in an earlier post. Well, I was busy over the weekend creating something lovely to show them off.

I used recycled denim to make fun, shabby chic corsages.

The corsages will be available from my Etsy shop.

I'll show more tomorrow:)

Buttons, Bites and Buildings

I'm feeling quite creative and have been bitten by the bug again- all I need now is time...

My poor little dog has been bitten by another kind of bug. He was stung by a wasp on his tail this morning for the second time this week! He is curled up on the chair feeling very sorry for himself:(
He'll be having lots of cuddles today to make up for it.

I received some gorgeous buttons  a few days ago from oritdotan at Etsy.

They are so gorgeous and I am mulling over how to use them as I am going about my business.

I had a fruitful day yesterday and I've been working on some more quirky little houses. This time I decided to make a 3D art sculpture (that sounds a bit grand!) and I wanted to incorporate letters as I am always immersed in grafitti around here!

So here it is, a liitle row of houses spelling out the word "HOME".

It can be purchased at my Etsy shop. Tell me what you think!

Raspberry Ripple

I finally managed to finish crocheting my circle scarf in beautiful shades of pink that remind me of a big bowl of crushed raspberries and ice cream!

 You can find out more about it in my Etsy shop (www.DottyBlueBird.etsy.com)

La Vie en Rose

Mr Dotty and I usually have an agreement that we won't "do" Valentine's day, preferring to express our romantic side when we choose. However, when I went upstairs to get dressed after Mr D had left for work this morning, I was surprised and delighted to find this sweet little music box on my pillow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONwwsCwSuBs


I love this tune and had admired the music box in Fred Aldous recently. I don't know when he managed to sneak back to buy it!

He's a good'un!!

Vibrant and Fragrant

My house smells gorgeous at the moment as I've been making more lavender sachets.
I love the uplifting colours of this one.

The fabric was printed with an image of graffiti, before I cut it into hexagons. I never really know how the end product will turn out and enjoy experimenting with the position of  the templates on the fabric to  produce abstract patterns.

You may be able to see which parts of the original image were used.

Collaboration

Mr Dotty has had a couple of days off from his day job and has been out and about taking photographs. We have thousands of his images stored on a hard drive and it is a great source of inspiration.

I have really been enjoying using some of the images he has taken directly in my work, combining traditional English patchwork (hand stitched over papers) with bright, urban images.

This is the original image

This is what I did with it