Boots, shoes and backgrounds.

I have made another pair of fairy shoes and pixie boots. I posted the ones on the left in the picture above some weeks back, then decided to make some more. I didn't paint the insides of the latest ones as I couldn't achieve the degree of brightness with my metallic paint that Annette Emms got.

I tried to get a more interesting fabric by layering a sheer over fine cotton, but the effect seems to have been lost. I don't know how Annette gets the amazingly delicate effects her shoes seem to have - probably a trade secret.

I buttonhole stitched round the top edge of these pixie boots with a metallic thread ......

.................... and added a tiny metallic tassel at the back to finish them off.

I have been continuing my experiments with my embellishing machine with a view to making backgrounds for machine or hand stitching. It is quite hard to do good machine stitching on some embellished backgrounds. I 'stole' the idea of stitching daisies from Gina Ferrari's blog

'Fan my Flame'. She has done some beautiful daisies - in fact everything she does is beautiful. You may remember the background to my daisies from a couple of posts back - it was embellished onto Lutrador and then distressed with the heat gun. I cut it in half with a view of using it for cards. I have just quickly machined each one onto a piece of painted paper.

These next samples are my pieces of knitting which you have also seen before, some weeks back. I have worked wisps of silk waste into them, along with strips of dyed muslin, scrim and sheers.

This is the only one which had a backing of Lutrador which makes it flatter and firmer, and I think it will be much easier to stitch onto. They all look like landscapes to me, so trees will most likely be featured on them, but whether stitched by machine or hand I haven't decided yet. I quite like the idea of cutting these in half down the middle to make a tiny scene.