Q is for Quoit

As well as diligently stitching away on the latest cross stitch (update on that tomorrow) I have also been working on the next set of postcards.


I ummed and ahhhed for ages over what to make for the Q swap, nothing was really speaking to me, that was until I was taking a stroll through dh's blog reminiscing on all the things that we'd experienced this year. I spotted a picture of lanyon quoit in this post and thought it would be the perfect inspiration.


Of course first came the gathering of ingredients. Some beautiful bright coloured felts.
This box of 'left overs'. These are all the embroidery threads that I had left over after finishing the last couple of cross stitch kits, as there has been quite a lot I knew I had to recycle them rather than throw them away
And finally my Clover needle felting tool, unfortunately I haven't been able to afford to splash out on an embellisher machine yet so hand punching it is for me.
First I put together the landscape backgrounds. I punched the felts onto a medium stabiliser, I used a thick needle in the punch tool which left lots of little pock marks, I decided I wanted a softer background for these cards so used the brush base to fluff them back a bit. I'm not sure if you can easily see the different in effect, but maybe if you enlarge the pictures?

I then used some white eyelash yarn to make some clouds, and, cut out some felt pieces for the standing stones and flower centres. I decided to leave the pocked effect on the stones as thought this provided some nice texture and a contrast to the softness of the background.
To finish off I put those embroidery threads to use. Using some detached chain stitches to create flower petals and some straight stitching to indicate grass along the horizon line. I also decided to straight stitch along the edges of the stones to give them a bit of definition, I'm not this that this quite worked, but I like the finished cards and it was enjoyable to work with felt again.