Speaking of Hobbits..

Yes.. I have been slight preoccupied with Hobbit-ish things lately!  

I was thinking about teacosies.. and it suddenly struck me that they're hill shaped.. all of a sudden I had a picture in my mind of a Bag-End teacosy.. you know how it goes, once the image is there it's best to make it 'cos it won't go away until you do :)

Layers of white English wool fibre for the inside..
this makes the cosy thicker and warmer than just merino

Outer layers of merino, adding curly locks, wool nepps and silk fibres for texture and colour

 Next I started building up the design.. the door, windows, steps, followed by flowers

I outlined the main elements with petrol green merino

I forgot to take a photo of the cosy once it was felted, but before I embroidered..  

I wanted to embroider the first line from the book onto the back of the cosy  'In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit..'  I thought about freehanding it, but wanted it to look distinctly Hobbit-ish and uniformly lettered.  After experimenting with drawing the letters myself I decided to print it off in Hobbit font, in different sizes

And tracing it onto tissue paper, which I could freemotion embroider
through and remove later

I experimented with what looked like the hardest word

Then pinned the sentence to the cosy, carefully embroidered through the tissue paper
and picked away the bits afterwards

Added simple hand embroidered flowers

I found the perfect vintage button in my stash for the door knob :)

I machined around the features I wanted to define
and added  simple hand embroidered flowers for the garden

I must be a slow stitcher.. I seemed to spend ages working on this! I am glad I made it though, it was fun :)  And now my mind is free to move on to other things