MUSINGS OF A MIXED MEDIA ARTIST: ORNAMENTS 2013

CICADAS

...for the grands...

Here it is the last few days of August and I am already thinking of the holiday season.

Every year I make an ornament for my grands to hang on their tree during the holidays....

As I was looking through this book by Kumiko Sudo when...

I came across this little cicada purse and decided to adapt it for this year's ornament.

So I got out my box of fabric samples and started looking for fabric for 9 cicada bodies....

I did not have enough of all one color so decided to do the girls and boys differently....

Here they are all cut, sewn and stuffed and waiting for their wings...

Each cicada has 4 wings and to make 1 wing I have to first cut a piece of stiff interfacing the shape of the wing then cut a fabric piece slightly larger and glue them together folding the edges to the back and do that 36 times...

Then each fabric wing is glued to a piece of felt and trimmed to size...

Here they are waiting to be trimmed ...

I was anxious to see how they were going to look so I pinned together a mockup to see how the wings would look. I think they are going to be cute...

Next came the eyes. They are sewn on using a large beads with a sequin and seed bead.

Pretty buggy aren't they...

After looking at them for a day and a half I decided I didn't like the way the machine sewn edge of the body looked so I started doing a hand stitch around them. I had to take time to find my book on hand stitches since as a rule I am not a hand sewer but finally came up the book and with a stitch that I could do pretty easily. It is called is a Cretan stitch.

Problem was I kept forgetting which side to put the needle in since they alternate with each stitch.

So...

I switched to the Blanket stitch which is how I did this one. It is much easier and goes faster so will finish all of them with this stitch...

I have all the edges stitched so next thing is to decide on embellishment with beads or not...I sort of am thinking about adding their first initial with beads to the front...it will be mostly covered with the wings but would give a bit of design and color to the bodies...will lay out one of them with thread and see how I like it...then decide on doing that much beading...

September 2nd...

Decided against beading. I do not think my eyes would hold up to beading 9 names with seed beads so instead I decided to use some gold glitter paint to write the names. I think it looks pretty good and it will hardly show at all when I get the wings sewn on. I hope to get that done tomorrow. I am almost finished with them. Only a couple of details left to do...

September 3rd