Baba Yaga Hut - Completed!

Yay! It even sort of stands on its own. I'm really excited to finish it. I've learned a few things in the process:
- Embroidering stuff is still super-fun
- Making legs out of pipe cleaners is very hard, and if you had a brain, you would have bought all pipe cleaners of the same color ( they didn't have them when I started the project, but I should have gone back! Now the toes are different colors, which I think is kind of neat)
- You can use hot glue to stabilize pipe cleaners on the inside of thick felt
- Having a deadline is very useful for me to get things done

I've been working on this for several months, and giving myself a deadline of having it done this week made things focus a lot better for me. I'm not sure where it's going to live, but it's definitely going to be hanging out around the place.

Again, this was inspired by Melissa Sue's Baba Yaga hut that I saw in Stuffed magazine. I loved hers so much, but I couldn't buy one, so I made one for myself.

(Secret: the door actually works, so you can look inside, but there's probably nothing interesting to see. Probably.)

Roving and Needle-Felting

Mr. Mallow, dressed to impress (this was supposed to end up being a penguin)

I have accumulated a great deal of wool roving. At first, I bought some of it (to make those infamous bacon bracelets), but then my friend Annie had bought some and decided that she had plenty of hobbies and gave me more. It's beautiful stuff, ranging through a rainbow of colors... but what to do with it?

Well, I could just make more of the 2-dimensional style items, like the bacon bracelets and the birds I like to make, but I decided I would try my hand at the 3-dimensional needle felting. I've watched a few videos online, but I still think I haven't quite got a handle on it. My ice cream cone turned into a pear, and this Mr. Mallow here was going to be a penguin, but he persisted in lacking the appropriately rounded shape!


I may have to resign myself to just letting the process dictate what the roving becomes, but it's hard to get started. Does anyone have any recommendations for 3-d needle felting? Or should I just stick with the 2-d stuff?