As a base for the felted pieces, I choose 100% linen, which I stabilized with a piece of starched craft felt. I attached the craft felt to the linen with a light spray of 505 temporary adhesive.
If you have an embroidery machine, you may have noticed that many commercial digitizing companies use felt as a base for their samples. Felt gives the stitches plenty of substance to wrap around. Several years ago, I experimented with felt as a stabilizer for dense embroidery designs and found that if I starched and ironed it (which makes it thin and crisp), it worked beautifully as a cutaway stabilizer.
Next, I used a standard size dinner plate and chalk marker to draw a circle on the linen. The circle would later serve as a placement guide for the flower and leaf shapes.
Placement Circle
The felted pieces had a little more loft to them than I wanted, so I sprayed them with some distilled water and pressed them with an iron set on the “wool” setting for about six seconds. This resulted in nice flat pieces, perfectly suitable for appliqué. (Lots of potential here!)
After Pressing – Before Pressing
After locating center placement for the bird, I began stitching the tail feathers with orange cotton embroidery thread. First, I free motion stitched each feather in place.
Free Motion Stitched Tail Feathers
I then changed to an open toe foot, raised the feed dogs, chose a blanket stitch on my sewing machine at a 2.8 mm width, and couched a #5 yellow perle cotton around the edges of the tail feathers.
Couching with Blanket Stitch
Next, I positioned the body of the bird and blanket stitched around his head.
I then changed to a dark gold embroidery thread and used a triangular shaped satin stitch to form the bird’s beak.
Satin Stitched Beak
Using the same color thread, I finished the edges of the bird’s body with a perle cotton-filled satin stitch.
In part three, my little bird will get his wings, and I’ll begin filling the chalk circle with some flora.
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N. Rene West
Time Treasured
