Happiness is a Package of Fibers

I had been working hard on my doll for Quilt Festival, doing machine embroidery which will cover the entire doll's body

when my sewing machine decided to stop working!  It's in the shop now and I have been impatiently waiting for its return.  So for the time being, this piece has been put aside.

Meanwhile I needed to find something to work on that did not require a sewing machine, so I decided to do a bit of hand embroidery (which will of course be made into a doll later).

I'm doing lots of lazy daisy stitches also called detached chain - sounds more "professional" ;)

So here is what I have so far.....

and I am running out of some of the threads I have used

so I head down to my needlepoint store only to be told that all of these threads have been discontinued!  Now there are 5 needlepoint stores in Houston (that I know of) so I called them all and no one had these threads anymore.  Not to despair:  I googled and was rewarded!  Sometimes, most of the time, I just LOVE the internet!

A day (just a day!) later a package arrived in the mail 

and I am back in business!  Thank you Thistle Needleworks!

Evolution

One of my newer pieces is not exactly new at all.  I have been working on the fabric for this piece for a long time.  I began with cotton velvet which I dyed, discharged and overdyed.  I machine embroidered the pieces and then hand embroidered them heavily in areas with raised chain band, french knots and seeding stitches in various fibers.  I didn't yet know what I would do with the fabric so it sat for a while in my studio.  Later on I added a layer of hand dyed spunbonded fiber, which I needlefelted into the velvet, then heat distressed in areas to expose the embroidery.  Lastly I heat embossed other areas of the fabric.

I originally wanted to make a pair of sisters.

I wasn't happy with the blue sister's face.  I gave her a new face and she looked older, more like a mother than a sister to the girl in red.

Mother and daughter would have been fine, but somehow I felt that a third generation was needed.  I had thought of making a "maiden mother crone" piece for a long time.  I don't really like the word "crone" to describe an older woman so I'm calling her a matriarch instead. 

And it has a nice sound to it:  Maiden Mother Matriarch

I added the cape, made of hand dyed silk matelasse, to tie the piece together.

Some of the embroidery detail:

Another piece of the fabric went into making "Heart of My Heart", which is at Copper Shade Tree Gallery

This photo shows the details of the machine and hand embroidery, the heat distressed spunbonded fiber and the embossed portions.

I have one more piece of this fabric left.  I wonder what I should make....