Drake's Felt Name Book



 

I just love to hand embroider on felt.  Felt cuts cleanly, comes in beautiful bright colors, and is pretty kid-resistant.  So when my son turned one, I made him a name book. 

 

I started out with the letters of his name, and stuck with animals as a theme.  I had seen a few beautiful books on crafster.org (so fun to peruse the crafts on there for ideas!)  I turned to Google images to start looking for images to use.  I'd use search terms like "xxx clip art" or something, so I narrowed the search down to cartoon-ish images.  

 

Once I found what I wanted to use, I turned to Powerpoint.  I made an 8"x8" box, since a felt sheet is 8x12, and I wanted a square book.  From there, I pasted my images in, played around with different fonts, and when I was done, I printed each page.

 

 

 

 

I then cut out the images and the text, and used them as templates to cut out the felt pieces.  I didn't use any glue or anything to hold each piece down, I just held the pieces to the background with one hand and stitched with the other.

 

I LOVE this site for embroidery stitch how-to....they have a picture dictionary where you can just look at the stitches, and click on the one you want to learn how to do: 

 

http://www.embroidery.rocksea.org/reference/picture-dictionary/ 

 

 I did mainly backstitch on the pieces and blanket stitched the pages together, but I did do a few fancier stitches in places.  I also added a few decorative buttons, and sometimes embroidered a few things completely, with no felt (especially if it was a tiny detail like the bird on the R page).  I typically used 3 threads for the embroidery.  I think I used 2 for the eagle to get more detail in the wings.  And I used the full 6 threads for the blanket stitch on the edge.

 

If you didn't know, a drake is a kind of duck, so I went with that for the cover:

 

 

D is for DRAGON

 

R is for RABBIT

 

A is for ALLIGATOR

 

K is for KANGAROO (See the K in the Australian flag?)

 

E is for ELEPHANT

  

R is for RHINOCEROS

 

E is for EGRET

 

E is for EAGLE

 

D is for DONKEY

 

 

 

 

Close up of the bird on the R page

 

Bird button on top of the tree

 

 

I have completed the pages of Violet's book.  Of course she turned one in December, and I haven't bound the book yet with the spine.  Hopefully this post will urge me to finish it and post pictures of hers!