Enjoying Textiles

Over the last couple of weeks I've really gotten into working with textiles again. That is my current passion. I'm exploring things to do with embroidery, on the sewing machine, and by hand. I really do love working with pretty feminine things. I get slightly ridiculously excited when I look at my collection of ribbons, beads, buttons and vintage fabrics. The combination of beautiful colours, patterns and textures inspires me to want to create something beautiful, fun, cute, feminine, delightful etc etc.
So I made these little badges/brooches by doing some small freehand sewing on felt, I then added a backing of wadding and another layer of felt and then added details so you got a slightly quilted effect. I always back my fabrics with interfacing so that it's a bit thicker for the embroidery, especially machine embroidery which can really pucker the fabric without it:

I made this quick fun card for my brothers birthday. I did the same thing, I used felt with interfacing underneath. I don't always bother to iron the interfacing on, I just pin it in place, it just saves a bit of time and still does the job of making the fabric more stable to work on:

This is a little purse I made, which isn't brilliantly finished and needs a good iron, is a mixture of freehand machine embroidery and hand embellishing. I used pieces of several different vintage fabrics and layered them on the base fabric, machine embroidering them on and then hand stitching details and adding items such as beads and bows etc to create a rich feminine surface of colour and pattern and texture: