Friday 15 May 2009

A rose for Rose

I am experimenting with putting pictures onto the blog. I have been failing miserably so far, but am determined to make it work! This is the first attempt...

It was my friend Rose's birthday last Sunday. As she seems to like handmade things, I was considering giving her some of my new "sandalwood" soap, but was hit by some actual inspiration. As you may already have guessed, I decided to make her a rose out of felt. You can see the result. Hopefully.

A few things have struck me. Firstly, I need to incorporate the wire which supports the stem into the flower itself early in the construction stage. It was a pain in the backside trying to conceal the end of the wire after I had made it, and even after I'd had a really good try, distorting the centre of the rose in the process, it still wasn't quite right and made itself another hole. Building the rose around the end of the wire would have meant I could have got the end felted securely beforehand, and I could have built the flower round it quite easily. I might even have managed to make it look like the centre of a rose...

The other thing that strikes me is that I really need to do some work on my posting of photographs. I could do with finding a background which is better than my dirty old settee (yes, the cover could do with a wash. Why do you ask?). Given the state my house is in at the moment, I don't imagine that it will be easy to find much free space, but I should at least work on getting a good (clean) white background to put on the settee.

The final thing which has struck me is that I need to re-size my photographs before I put them on flickr - perhaps if they were smaller I would be able to make them display on other webpages, and would not use up quite so much of my monthly allowance. Not that this is likely to be a problem, of course, judging by my efforts so far.

2 comments:

Lisa Moon said...

Wow, good job! What a pretty flower and lovely gift idea. I'm sure great effort went into that, not just the wiring part.

Is your settee from Ikea by chance?! It looks familar, that cover...

Optistatic said...

They take a long time to make! I shall be experimenting with a few different methods tonight, I think - I really want to be able to produce a flower while only putting in about an hour of work in total. In other words, I am aiming for the impossible!

The settee is indeed from Ikea. The cover was given to me by a friend - she had grown tired of its oldness and bought a new one, which worked out perfectly for us!

How are you doing? I am hoping that your life is so fun right now that you just don't have time to blog, but I am a little worried that perhaps you are not OK. (Sorry - that sounds all passive-aggressive - "why aren't you blogging?" - it's really not meant that way!) I mean, you have no obligation to blog, of course, but I hope that you are OK!