Wool felt applique cushions

While I was in Sydney I went to the Material Obsession shop, and was fortunate enough to meet up with Wendy Williams again. I'd first met Wendy when she taught a class at Handmade in Wellington in June 2013. I was really inspired by her designs, and have used quite a few of her patterns since then.

I took my cushion covers along to show her. These are made by cutting circles or flowers out of fabric, and then appliqueing them onto felt. If you're going to try this at home, don't cut the felt until you've sewn the fabric on - it's too hard to made the fabric fit a precut circle. Once you have a pile of flowers on felt, you can plan the layout and hand stitch them onto the background using Perle 8.

my first wool felt applique cushion

and the second one

I purchased these patterns from Wendy at the Handmade workshop, but they are available on her website: Flying Fish kits if you're interested. They're also included in her book called Wild Bloom and Colorful Creatures, along with may other templates for birds and other creatures. The book is better value because it contains lots of patterns, but the book wasn't published at the time I bought the patterns.

Wendy William's book

As you can see, I changed the patterns up to suit my colour scheme - pinks, blues and the odd bit of purple.

Those with eagle eyes will note some of the fabrics from my Bordered Diamonds quilt have made it into these cushions. I've been making good progress on quilting those last diamonds and now only have 3 more to go (plus the 10 I'm going to redo). I'm hoping to get them all finished this weekend, but I don't think I'll be able to get a photo because the forecast is terrible.

While I was at Material Obsession I saw this great cushion on a chair, which had clearly been made by Wendy:

I think that I might just have to make myself a 'W' cushion too, but not until I've finished some of the other projects I have on the go.