Little Sister Handmade

A sweet little brown bear:

He’s made from the beautiful alpaca roving I used for the tree in the Valentine’s Calendar.  It’s wonderfully soft, but it took a LOT of needling to get it to really felt together.  I didn’t notice it so much on the little mouse, but the bear was harder.  Still, it’s beautiful, and it’s nice to have seen the animals from whom the roving comes and know they are well-loved.  Certainly worth the extra effort!

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This little guy:

I’m curious to see if his species is recognizable, or if I need to try again?

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Your second clue is this little guy:

I hope you all had as wonderful of a day as I did.  What a beautiful moment in history.  What a brighter future for our children!

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I’ve been working on a Valentine’s Day present for the little man, who is now 18 months old. There are quite a few parts to it, and I thought I would see how many parts I’ll have to post before someone guesses what I’m up to.  Keep checking back, and when you’re ready to guess, just leave a comment.  The winner will receive a little felted bunny.

I won’t be doing a tutorial for this, since I’m using the instructions from this wonderful book for some of the components.

Here’s the first clue. (Though if you can guess it already, you’re a mind reader!  I’m expecting people to need at least three or four clues.)

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My sweet little sheep has proven pretty popular, so I thought I’d post a little about how I made him (and his fellow sheep).  The body of the sheep is just a simple sheep shape cut out of white felt, along with two white felt ears.  I then blanket-stitched him to the background and embroidered his facial features.  The blanket-stitching was the most time-consuming part; the easiest was needle-felting a bit of wool onto his body.  I got the general idea from this precious book, which has so many inspiring wool felt projects and little bendy dolls (I’ll share some of those in another post). The sheep in this book also has a sleepy little embroidered face, but his fleece is made of french knots rather than wool roving. Honestly, I’ve never been able to master french knots, so I redesigned him a bit (i.e. took the easy way out), and I’m really pleased how he turned out.

Originally, the sheep was meant to decorate a little felt purse from the book, but he was just too charming to only make one. This year we created sets of handmade ornaments for our families, and I couldn’t resist including a little sheep in each set. As with any handmade item, each sheep looked a little different, had a little different charm, and in the end, it seemed almost a shame to separate the flock. But then I thought of each going to hang on the tree of one of my flock, a small bond in a world in which we all live too far apart.

Here they all are, waiting to be packed up and sent off for Christmas. Each one a little gift of heartfelt handmade.

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