Little bit closer...

I was talking with my tutors and have decided to make my collar a little differently, I'm gonna buy a vintage collar and put my butterflies on that so it'll look a little bit like this...

Pretend Butterflies

Well, had a very busy few days of sewing, sewing and more sewing and I've made quite a few butterflies for you to see...

It's not finished or even close but thought you'd like a peek in my head of what it'll look like :)

On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

Fiiiive Roooo-oooo-biiiins! (that bit must be read like you'd sing 'five gold rings') I probably should've waited a few days untill it was the 5th but I was too excited.

I've been sewing away at Christmas things now it's getting close to Christmas and I've been making little robin baubles for christmas trees and thought I'd share them with you :)

Camberwell Beauty

Had a very exciting friday, I made a pretendy neckpiece base for practice. I used plain cotton for the top and layered chiffon over plain cotton for the collar. That bit didn't work quite as well as I'd hoped, mainly cos I'd been ignoring the fact that chiffon was quite so see-through so its ended up with a big hem so I'm gonna try overlocking and, fingers crossed, that'll work better.

Then I sewed and sewed and sewed and made some beautiful Camberwell Beauty Butterflies...

This one is is organza with free motion machine embroidery

This is a photocopy on acetate that I machine embroidered the detail on.

 

I loooove the organza one, I was so excited I didn't wnt to look at it while I was sewing the bottom wings on which I think is why it went a bit wonkey lol. The thing is though, because the fabric is so light and the embroidery is so heavy, the wings just fall. I think that when I've gont a lot together I'll be able to put a little stitch between the wings and that'll sort it.

The acetate one actually worked a lot better than I thought it would which was quite a nice suprise. I might put the occasional acetate butterfly on to keep the wings upright.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho...

It's off to sew we go...
Spent yesterday dyeing and today sewing, what fun. I've been playing with Organza, Chiffon and Crepe de Chine and these are some of the beautiful colours I've come up with...

Except I found out after I'd spent all day sewing these wings that chiffon sort of shrinks and wont stretch back into the proper shape no matter how hard you try.

Hopefully the organza will work better.

It's getting exciting now...

I've been playing with my 3D butterflies and I'm a bit excited now - I pinned them onto a mannequin neck to see what they'd look like and I want to make it now!

These are my fave 3 layouts...

Was thinking of doing either the first one or the last one, I just liked how the middle one reminded me of a bowtie :)

Flutterbys

Got some more pretty butterflies for you :) These ones are the '88' butterfly, because of its markings, the zebra butterfly and I think it's called the Blue Adonis - it's a teeny tiny blue one I've only ever seen in Guernsey...

 These ones are all British ones (I think the top one is anyway, not sure where it's from cos I took the pic at Manor Heath Park and Jungle Experience in Halifax). The other ones are - Red Admiral, Gate Keeper, Purple Emperor, Camberwell Beauty and Small Heath. Well, thats what it said on the website and it looked very official.

All done with watercolour and pencils :)