Felters Journey: When one simple addition..

didn't go as simply as I expected!

I recently had a request for a Hobbit Hole tea cosy complete with Party Tree on top. No problemo.. I could picture just how I was going to do it; felted cords, beads for leaves etc. To begin with it went to plan..

I made the tree from short felted cords..
leaving enough fluff at the bottom to root it into the teacosy.

I'd also been asked to include the gate one this one :)
I used natural oatmeal BFL

rooted in nicely :)

Adding machine embroidery for definition

AND I finally remembered to take photos as I was free motion embroidering the script!

I love my darning foot! It's great for free-motioning..
I just follow the line of the writing on the tissue paper, being careful not to tear it
as I go. This one was even trickier to machine stitch on than usual due to the tree lol

After stitching I tear the tissue off and pick out any tiny bits caught in the stitching

And this is where things went wrong for a while.. I had planned to use green glass seed beads, stitched to the limbs of the tree to represent leaves. In my mind it worked.. in reality it really didn't! After beading more than half of the tree I decided to take them all back off and do it differently. So once again I beaded just over half of the tree.. again it just wasn't working, so off they came.

After some tooth grinding and growling :) I decided to cut small leaves out of a piece of variegated green felt left over from a previous project and stitch them on.. And I LOVE how it turned out now! Shame I just didn't do it this way to begin with. I had thought about it but got caught up with thoughts of perspective and how tiny the leaves would need to be.. DUH who said it needed to be realistic?!

In the book the tree is described as always being decorated ready for a party, with coloured lanterns and bright streamers and garlands..