New Project- chair I can’t use

I intended to use a chair covered with a felt blanket for my fairy to sit on with this project. But once I had the base put together, the proportions were completely off and even if I used it for other figures, it’s actually still too big for the size of this base.

This is the chair, well, rather a love seat. I used several colours of wool roving and felted it with my embellisher. I enjoyed the project even though I can’t use it this time, but it was a good exercise to get me back to using my machine. Having not used it for a while, I of course created holes that I didn’t actually want. ;o~  What I learned when that happened, you can fold felt on top of itself, run it through the embellisher and make those holes disappear and just go over and over the folds to make those disappear too.

After creating the piece of felt, I draped it over the love seat and with needle and thread, stitched it in place. Even though I can’t include this in my project, it’ll be there for another time. I’d like to increase the size of the base, but it’ll get heavier and heavier to lift by the time all the elements are added…

Another post to come soon with pictures of the fairy.

Here is the chair before the blanket. It measures about 6” wide, about 3” deep and tall.

Shabby Rose Fairies 2017

As promised, here are the Shabby Rose fairies for this year. I used approx. 23 different fabrics, and a few one offs. There are mostly two fairies for each fabric and those few one offs. For each set on fairy is flying with straight legs, the other will bent legs.

Their wings are made with a combination of feathers, floral spray leaves, and floral spray flower petals. I buy them at different times of the year, but at Christmas time I look for the flowers because of all the glitter and other effects they are treated with. I think the shop owners are getting used to me coming in for them, they know they are going to be dismantled.  ;o)

The other embellishments are seed beads for wrist and ankle bracelets and the faux perfume bottles I showed in a previous post.

Here you go with the parade of fairies, and at the end, you’ll see how I have half of them hanging on the tree (even through the nose ring), waiting to go to the gallery on Tuesday… You can hardly even see the tree anymore, the fairies are everywhere. lol  A little hard to photograph to do them justice. I would normally pin them to the board, but this time I didn’t put hanging cords on them, just regular hangers. Look in a previous post to see them, they are really pretty gold scroll hangers. I laid them in groups to photograph them. Hopefully you can see them well enough. Enjoy. ;o)

Tree Fairies or A Fairy Tree?

After a lot of fussing and tweaking and repeat, the tree was dressed with fairies. Then I noticed a glaring blank spot between the nose and the top, so another branch had to be added. I used a pattern by Brenda Coulter, but enlarged it by about 150%, so that it stands approx. 27” tall. Click HERE for Brenda’s Etsy shop. The pattern costs next to nothing, but was just the absolute best thing.

I did the branches a little differently, not by a lot, but because the fairies are displayed there, they had to be carefully placed so the fairies weren’t crashing into each other. Here’s the front view, can you see the face?

Using a selection of batik fabrics, I cut squares for the body and made a patchwork effect piece of material. After cutting out the pattern, you can see how they morphed and formed some nice curved lines, rather than just straight up and down. The branches are made from full pieces of batik, not pieced.

Here’s a profile picture. I haven’t put branches on the back side because this way it can go up against the wall and will hopefully not stick out too much. With lots of visitors at the gallery show/sale, I don’t want people bumping into it and the fairies would be most upset if they got knocked off.

I didn’t do any sculpting on the face, just applied the eyes and eyelids and stuffed the nose well. On the branches, I stitched on split rings to hang the ornaments from, even gave him a nose ring, just couldn’t help myself. ;o)

The finishing touch was to glue on some moss pieces here and there to give the tree a bit of a woodsy feel. Tomorrow I’ll post the pictures of the fairies and how they look on the tree. Half of the fairies will go to the gallery on Tuesday, the rest as needed throughout the 3 month show, along with a few Christmas themed ones. See you tomorrow… ;o)