Dragonfly

I still haven’t found the iridescent fabric I managed to tidy away, but I did find something I think turned out better in the end, and so the dragonfly for the second pouch is well underway. I stitched the body in satin stitch blocks…

…and the thorax in a sort of long and short stitch with detached chain stitch and french knot legs and clustered french knot eyes.

Then onto the wings. While looking for the iridescent fabric I had in mind, I found some purple hand dyed silk organza and an iridescent organza. I fused them with bondaweb and ended up with the perfect fabric for the wings!

I’m using it with the purple uppermost but there is still plenty of subtle sparkle. Veins in back stitch, following the lines you would find on a real dragonfly’s wings.

I have a real hankering to make some more of these sea glass watch case pendants.

But when I went looking for the watch cases I found this:

A box of clock hands I bought ages ago at a car boot sale and forgot about! I had a lovely quiet afternoon sitting on the patio sorting them all out.

Most of the really ornate ones are singletons, but there were a surprising amount of pairs and I chose a couple of simple geometric hands to turn into a pair of upcycled earrings with a bit of a steampunk vibe.

The hands are very light – probably aluminium – and those gorgeous purple art glass beads give them enough weight to hang nicely in the ear.

The earhooks and all the other metal is sterling silver and they are available here in my Etsy shop with free UK P&P.

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Wonders will never cease!

The cuff book is finished. But I forgot to take a photo of it! Not that it’s changed much – just had the pages stitched to the spine with a single line of pamphlet stitch, decorated with some seed beads.

So is the leather bracelet. Both flowers completed and three matching quartz bead dangles added.

I finally found the right size drill bit to make setting the cogs easy for the black and white steampunk brooch and once I’d done that, the finishing was easy.

Then the embroidered pendant for a bow shaped pendant brooch, missing its drop, was the next to be sorted. It started like this:

Then I put three pieces of walnut dyed vintage fabric together and secured them with beaded blanket stitch. The back is a damask, the middle canvas and this side is some embroidered net that I always understood was associated with my great-grandmother who died in 1970.

It was a little dull so I went over some of the pattern with silk threads in faded shabby chic tones …

…and then hung it from the brooch.

Rather pleased with myself. And to top all that I’ve even got them listed in my Etsy shop:  Flower bracelet, black and white steampunk brooch and pendant brooch. Wonders will never cease!

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Cuff and stuff

The cuff book is now lined, pressed…

…and about to have a selection of papers stitched into it.

A damaged leather and chain boho style leather bracelet is having new leather flowers.

 Embroidered like the original felt ones with long stitches in variegated thread with bead centres.

One more to go onto here.

And a beautiful Art Deco buckle which was cracked in two places (centre and bottom right)…

…is becoming an assemblage steampunk style brooch.

In the background, two vintage watch faces, one further embellished with a mother of pearl disc, and a random piece of filigree added to the outside with a humming bird charm dangling from a convenient loop.

Still a little more finishing to do on all of them – I’m finding it difficult to settle to complete one thing at a time these days!

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Steampunk journal

This started with another full day workshop at our Embroiderers’ Guild branch: Brown Paper Embellishment with Fran Holmes. I didn’t have any brown paper but reasoned that an odd piece of vintage sheet music would work as well. So we had a lovely session scrunching and adding crayon, more scrunching, more crayon, then layering our paper with flowers etc. (I used simple leaf shapes cut from silk) Mistyfuse, chiffon and interfacing on the back. Then we ironed transfoil onto the front which caught in random places depending on how much Mistyfuse was still sticky through the chiffon.

After all that, I ended up with this:

Fran showed us how to further embellish the pieces with machine stitch, but I went for hand stitching and some seed stitches on the bottom piece with my favourite variegated Madeira thread.

This was the starting point for a steampunk journal I’ve been planning to make ever since we were invited to a friend’s steampunk themed wedding. As the wedding was yesterday (and FABULOUS!) I can now reveal the rest of it.

The top piece of paper with die-cut cogs and a distressed watch face stitched onto it, became the basis for the front cover over a chipboard base:

Some flat-backed gems and an old earring cabochon added texture and sparkle.

Put together with rings to bind.

I had great fun going through my stash of papers and ephemera to make the pages of the book.

The scraps of vintage fabric on the right hand page were hand dyed with walnuts from Oxburgh Hall a couple of summers ago.

On the right hand page, which is the inside of the back cover, those layers are a multi-part pocket into which I’ve slipped some more bits and pieces for use elsewhere in the journal.

And the back cover.  I hope the bride gets as much pleasure out of using it as I did making it.

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