Stitched postcard #1 - felted flowers

Those of you who read my WOYWW post will know that I mentioned a piece of grey felt that was waiting to be sprayed with colour sprays. I was really pleased with how that worked, I sprayed several different colours on and then used kitchen towel to dab off the excess. Once dry this gave a really pretty background.

I've finished the project this afternoon. (Should probably have cleaned the house - oops!) It's a stitched postcard, (or artist mailing card). The basic idea came from a book called 'Stitched Postcards' by Christa Rolf. This inspired my layout of 3 felted flowers with free machine embroidery, the rest just came together as I played.

I took my sprayed felt and dry felted, (i.e. with a felting needle), 3 flower heads on to the background by laying red, yellow and orange wool fibres in a spiral. Then I used free machine embroidery to go over the flowers and to decorate the background. For the flower stems rather than use more felt I found an old paper bag handle (knew this would come in useful one day!). I cut slits in the felt to poke the ends through.

Once I had worked out where all the stems would go I cut a leaf shape from brown card to match and stitched this on with the machine first. I then put the stems back in place, couched these on by hand and added wooden beads to the flower heads.

The word ribbon seemed quite fitting since I love free machine emboidery, mixing textiles with paper, beads, the colours on this piece, the felting - I love it all really.
The flower heads had popped up a bit when I embroidered them so I decided to exploit this before sewing the backing on by adding some wadding behind them.

Hope you like the finished piece.