The Wookie/Romulan Craft Crossover: Embroidered Felt Wall Art with Buttons...Cute...Thing.

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No, your memory is not failing you, nor is it that funny taste that may have been in your drink. Although, if that actually happened, you may want to look into it. You may have seen this post before. In an attempt to make everything easier to navigate for everyone, I am working on transferring all of the old beauty and craft posts from the recipe blog to their appropriate homes on the newer wings. I'll be only one a day so as not to clog up your feeds, so please bear with all the boring re-caps!

-WW

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This is another one that got inexplicably popular...One of the most re-pinned, which is funny, because I was so unhappy with it I only posted it as a "well, here's...something, anyway"...sort of a "they can't all be winners" post.

Many of you may know Mass Effect 3 just came out. On the night of its Wal-Mart birth, we went to get the Wookie a copy. Now, I'm a gamer, but I wasn't at all stoked about Mass Effect 3. There's many 360 games that I love to watch him play, but they've yet to come out with one that I want to play badly enough to deal with that massive, ungainly controller. I'm a Play Station girl, what can I say, and since we don't own a PS3, this has pretty much limited me to PC gaming or playing on one of our gazillion other consoles we have lying around here. Poor me, I know.

Anywho, since I anticipated he'd be neck-deep in Mass Effect 3 for at least the next month, I decided to stubbornly drag him around the Wally-World craft section for half an hour (total rant: WHAT is up with the Wal-Mart craft section, it COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY SUCKS, which makes my life hell since any actual craft stores are to hell and gone across town and we rarely get out that way) until I found something to keep me occupied for a while while he was doing recliner-yoga, blasting things into oblivion, and making odd conversation with space aliens. I ended up getting a big pack of felt and a econo-pack of embroidery floss.

This is the first project I made when we got home, and something I just played around with until I liked how it looked.

You'll need:
Buttons (I had a ton of vintage ones I was trying to find some uses for, which is where this project originated)
Embroidery floss - two colors minimum
Thread
Felt
Embroidery hoop (I used a plastic one)
Sequins or other deco
Needle (duh)
Pins (optional, but they do make life easier)

First, pick the felt color you want for your background and put it in the hoop. For those first-timers who aren't aware of how this works, you just put the little hoop on what you want to be the back-side of your felt and the big hoop on the front side, then push them together. If you have a plastic hoop like the one I'm using, it should make it nice and taught all on its own. If you use a wooden one, you may have to tug it taught on your own before you tighten down the little screw. Once the felt is in place, you're ready to rock.

Place the buttons in whatever configuration you wish. I just played around with them until I was happy with how it looked, then pinned them all in place by jamming a pin through a hole of each button. Then, pick the color of embroidery floss you want to use to secure the buttons and thread your needle.

Sew on all the buttons. I went through some of them twice, depending on how much I wanted the orange floss to show in the flowers.

Next, take the color you've chosen to do the details and stitch them in...Green if you're doing a flower pattern like me...Or brown if your flowers are dead, I guess. I just eyeballed-it, didn't draw a pattern or anything. I'm not THAT artsy and I can't draw to save my life and I'm not that good at embroidery, either, (still new at it and learning) but I figured there was something seriously amiss with me if I couldn't stitch a damned flower stem without a pattern.

Here's the completed stems. Yes, I know my leaves look more like thorns, don't make fun of me!!

Next, I wanted to add a few gold and silver sequins for a bit of sparkle and to take up a bit of the dead space. These, I sewed on with regular ol' white thread. Now, I didn't want the knot at the end of the thread to go through the felt, so I just tied one of the little sequins to the end instead so it would catch in the back and my project would be all safe.

I randomly stitched on the sequins until I was satisfied with them. Sometimes, you get ornery sequins and you have to make sure they know who the boss is.