New year's hoop art tutorial

Hello!
This is a project I had in my mind for a while, it didn't take me a long time to make it and I do love the result. I've used white fabric mounted on an 6 inch embroidery hoop and black felt numbers to "write" the new year. I've used a font called twinkle and after I printed my template I cut each number from paper and then used them as templates to cut the felt. A nit little trick I did to cut the insides of the 4 & 0 is this: I used blue chalk to mark the cut out on the felt, as you can see in the second photo and then used my pointy scissors to cut it out.

I placed my numbers on the fabric and then started embroidering them. I did the little twinkles first to secure the number in place then used scissors and tweezers to remove the paper. Then I just traced the number with white thread. I followed the same rules for the rest of the numbers, first I embroidered the little stars and after removing the paper I embroidered the outline.
And when I finished I had my new year's hoop all done, I love the contrast of the white fabric and black felt!

Wishing you a great day,
Aleka

Linked to Homework, LizMarieBlog, PersiaLou & Whipperberry

Felt bones

Halloween is a holiday we don't have in Greece, there is a similar holiday called "Apokries" where people dress up but it's not really linked to witches, monsters and scary things. So I've learned to love Halloween from movies, one of my favorites is Tim Burton's "Nightmare before Christmas" and this absolutely fantastic song!
So here's a super easy tutorial for making felt bones. I've used grey and black felt and after cutting out the shapes I stitched them together with matching thread colors and stuffed them with polyfill batting. You can use the last image as a guide for the shapes, the three bone shapes fit an A4 page. Just right click and save the image.
You can make lots and lots of them to have as decorations for Halloween :-)
Have a lovely weekend,
Aleka