365 / 64 - some sewing and some secrets revealed!

Yesterday I was feeling tired and sleepy and a little bit grumpy so I took the opportunity to curl up with my sewing and totally ignored my to do list in favour of some soothing stitchery. I made six little plush bird brooches (the seventh you can see in the picture was made the other day, a test bird!), cut out the final finishing teeny pieces of felt for my work-in-progress moth brooches, and did most of the work on two little cherry blossom pins. Here they all are, in the bright sunshine:
The cherry blossom pins are part of the secret I have been hiding from you. My secret swap partner (who has now received her gift) was the lovely greygoat who said she liked corsages and is known to love Japanese things... so I decided to make her a Sakura (cherry blossom) branch out of felt, an appliqued corsage. It ended up so large that it has two pinback fastenings stitched on the back to keep it in place, and took rather a while to sew... but I'm really very pleased with how it turned out:As I had a few of the little pink beads left over (they really are just the perfect beads for this, lovely pale pearlescent things with dark pink insides) I decided to use my new cherry blossom pattern to make pins for my shop...
They are really enjoyable little pins to make, I love adding the beads and the little embroidered details, and making them has allowed me the chance to try out some of the alternate solutions I had for the main corsage (darker thread for the central embroidery, not stitching the darker pink felt onto the backing to make it stand out more). It's lovely to have made a flower that actually resembles a real flower instead of a stylised retro "flower-type" shape like I've made previously. I'll hopefully be finishing the in-progress pins this evening, and I am going to try and finish at least one of those darn moths! They've been sitting around unfinished for far, far too long.