My Pride and Joy...

... for the whole month of April was the big mobile I was working on for my friend Neal. Not the most helpful of chaps, he didn't say what he actually wanted it to look like just that it shouldn't be girly, and that it should be "awesome". Oh, and he refused to approve a plan or a work-in-progress shot, he just wanted a parcel to show up one day. Haha. Not nervewracking at all, no no.

I have recently been making lots of brooches using different layers of coloured felt, like this flower brooch:I thought of how chunky the layers make the piece, and how it might be cool to do an abstract version of it... My girly instincts made me want to embellish it somehow with sequins or little buttons or something but I decided (much more sensibly) to go for a simpler look with loads of bright colours providing the interest. So, I got out my stash of felt, picked 16 colours (I snuck some pretty purple in there but no pink!) and made a big mess on the kitchen table cutting out all of these:
I layered the different colours and made two of each piece, so they could be sewn back to back. While sewing them I was fascinated by how much they reminded me of butterfly wings but seeing them in pairs I was also a little worried that the mobile might end up looking like a bunch of weird creepy eyes, following you round the room...
Getting them all sewn together was rather exciting as I got the first real chance to see what the mobile might end up looking like, whether the pieces were as satisfyingly chunky as I had hoped, how the stitching did or didn't work with the design, and how all the colours and shapes looked together:I then had a real Blue Peter moment, working out a layout for the pieces and clothes-pegging the trial strands to an old coat-hanger for a bit of product testing on my balcony (slightly breezy so a great chance to see it spinning) - you can just see the blue pegs in the top of this picture, and the tiles are my neighbour's roof:... then finally it was time to sew it all together, and see how the whole thing looked.
I was so chuffed with this that it was rather a wrench parcelling it up to Neal. He seems to like it so: phew! Lots more pics of the finished mobile & the work-in-progress can be seen on my flickr page.