Here’s another finish from last week. I spotted these free patterns on Michelle Palmers website. She does all sorts of designs for applique or needle punch as well as some cute pen and ink illustrations. Each year recently she has kindly published a free design or two for a felt Christmas stocking. They are gorgeous designs.

I decided to stitch the one with a barn owl on. I found some nice felt in Boyes, it isn’t 100% wool like Cool Craftings wool, but it feels fine and it comes in a lovely range of colours. I chose a dark spruce green for the main stocking.

I wanted some subtle shading on the felt – the one on Michelles blog uses felt with a smudgy sort of finish. I only had plain felt so I cut out the various shapes and added colour with silk paints. I’ve not used them on felt before but it worked pretty well, I tried painting it on but it was a bit splodgy so I dunked the whole piece in the brush water which nicely evened out the paint a bit more, I could then add more colour to certain areas and it blended in well with the wet bits. The barn owls wing started off the same colour as his breast but as you can see it’s coloured up nicely,

The pattern just had the face of the owl embroidered with all the French knots, I love that bit. I decided the rest of the owl needed a bit of stitching too. I embroidered the breast first with fly stitch in a variegated cream. It took me a while to get going on the wings as I couldn’t work out how the feathers went. Fortunately someone on facebook on a bird-watching in Yorkshire fb page shared a photo of a barn owl in extactly the same pose! As you can see I used a variety of stitches with a DMC variegated thread, feather stitch, herringbone, fly, blanket and back stitch.

The wooden post he’s sitting on has a little bit of stitching, just some back-stitch to give a little detail. Round the bottom are some gorgeous seedheads with what I think is meant to be snow collecting in the cup of the seed head. They stand out beautifully on the dark green felt.

All that was left to do was to blanket stitch the front and back together. I really enjoyed stitching this piece and I’m already stitching another of Michelle’s Christmas stockings!