Create Your Day...

Good Morning to all you lovely people!  I am a Morning Person... I wake up happy and cheerful (and EARLY!) most of the time and when the birds are singing and the sun is shining I FEEL GOOD!  I also am kind of a Pollyanna- always trying to find the good in a situation because I truly believe that WE "Create Our Day" because it's all in your perspective... and I try to practice what I preach... I created this Cheerful and Happy little piece for the "My Sweet Earth"blog post today using Susan K. Weckesser's "Create Your Day" stamp set by Unity Stamps, a felting technique and some embroidery floss...what a cool new way to use my stamps!  

I have never felted before (although I have had the stuff in my closet for about five years (grin) picked up on a holiday in Prince Edward Island and just waiting for the perfect moment to be retrieved) and it was REALLY easy.  But I used very small images and I would recommend starting with something a little larger if you don't want YOUR "blue bird" to look like a fish with legs (grin).

Felting is a pretty simple technique and requires very few tools... some felt, a felting needle and some raw dyed wool (called Roving) that looks and feels like a mound of colored cotton balls, oh yeah and some kind of foam under your work that the needle can be jabbed into (I used an old piece of styrofoam). 

That's it... you just jab the wool into the felt and fill in each area until it is as flat or puffy, dark or light, thick or thin as you would like it.   

I started by stamping my images onto a 4x4 square of felt that I picked up in a local store for fifty cents and it accepted the stamped images beautifully. 

You can shade, you can pull out mistakes, you can cover up stuff... it is really, really fun and there are lots of "how to's" on the web... 

I wanted my images to pop a little more so I outlined them using different colored embroidery floss.  

And I just used a pen to write my words in and then stiched over them with floss.  I added a stiched border also to finish off the project and I absolutely LOVE how it turned out... 

Here is a second piece I created using some of my Donna Downey flower stamps by Unity Stamp Co.  I really went to town with the creative stitching on this one.  Now I want to add some kind of word... and probably a border and then it will be finished...

Thanks for stopping by to see what I am up to this week... now GO and Create something Lovely with your day! (and leave me a comment if you like before you do!)

Scrapbook Lynne