I decided to call your attention to a felt doodling tutorial.

I’d note that I’ve missed the contest, but I want to share my idea with you.

Now more and more people are engaged into doodle or zentangle drawing / colouring. This calms you down or helps to concentrate on something, quite the contrary. So, I’ll say it plain and simple. I decided to felt it.

The materials you need:

- doodling pattern;

- cloth base;

- 1 mm felt;

- mouline threads of two colours;

- white pencil;

- needle and eye pins;

- patience, which is of no small importance :)

So, let’s start.

I was inspired by this picture and picked closely alike felt colours (among those that I had):

I offer you the owl pattern I’ve painted for myself, but you can use another pattern for this purpose.

In the photo above you see that I used two sketches — one for guiding my eye, another for work. I cut out the details of the sketch and transferred them to felt. For that, cut out the owl along its outline and draw out the pattern on the felt with the white pencil. Then cut out the first line of feathers of paper and then of felt. Remember, that it’s felt doodling and you don’t need mathematical exactness here, so you can cut by eye.

Where the pattern has bold lines, use feathers of two colours (mine were lilac and violet). Cut out new lines of feathers.

At first, apply felt feathers to the pattern, see if they match each other. Then transfer them to the cloth base and sew their ends — I mean the part hidden under the next row of feathers — with three stitches.

Here go the photos I took at night, so excuse the colour rendering.

Embroider the wing of the birdie with feathers this way.

Getting down to the work, cut out the eyes and beak of the pattern and find their place on the cloth base.

Start filling the cloth with feathers from the edge to the center. When the first row of the head feathers is filled up, continue with the bridge of the nose.

In the photo below, see the coloured parts that should be filled.

Little by little, patiently and carefully give life to our little owlet :)

When the free spaces are filled with feathers (you needn’t fill the beak), apply the eyes and the beak. I didn’t like the beak in the first pattern and decided to settle on the second one.

Sew on the eyes with a backstitch. But make it look like a frontstitch — leave more space between the stitches. Sew the beak the same way.

Continue with leaves. I chose three different sizes for leaves and cut them out of green felt, 6 leaves per each size.

Apply them to the cloth and pin. Then start sewing like feathers.

When the leaves are sewed on, decor them with triple stitches like you did before.

When the leaves are sewed, embroider the sprig with a feather stitch using white thread.

I decided to set the top sprig aside — to my mind, all looks fine. If anyone wants to do it up to the end, wish you good luck and patience!

I’ll be happy if the tutorial would prove useful to you. And be grateful for your likes :)

Truly yours,

Elena