Vectors in Felt

I've known for a long time that I really like to sew. My mom has, for just as long, offered to teach me to sew on her old sewing machine. For years and years I refused to touch sewing machines. I have had a lot of very satisfying reasons for avoiding sewing machines as though they were the Bird Flu or racist. First of all, I'm convinced that I have a certain sort of sensory disorder wherein I am unerringly repelled by droning sounds. The list of things I hate that have droning noise in common is eerily long. I loathe cicadas. I can't stand air purifiers. Furnaces scare me. Washing machines, driers, dishwashers and vacuum cleaners raise my anxiety level to well above what could possibly be described as "normal". It took me a long time to relax around my fish tank filter in college. The buzz of sewing machines is enough to make me want to shove my head between the couch cushions - despite what I know is down there. In addition to my rejection of the droning noise, I also used to extract an unhealthy amount of pleasure from my Mom's reaction when I'd tell her I was sewing a King sized quilt together... by hand. On top of that, I view hand sewing as sort of badass. Like, You sewed that on your machine in 10 minutes? How quaint. I sewed 200 yards of lace to that skirt by hand. Without a thimble. It took me a month. See this pirate bandaid? That's where I stuck myself so hard that I almost bled.
At some point my husband started doing secret research on sewing machines. Then one day he presented me with his findings and the fact that he had set aside a portion of our budget to pay for one brand new sewing machine. I was incredibly skeptical. I tried to be as excited as he was, I just wasn't eager to give up my badass image. I think he was looking forward to decreasing the portion of our budget spent on pirate bandaids.
Regardless, we ordered one and at a later date I'll wax rhapsodic about how shiny and pretty and smart it is. I do a lot of sewing on it these days, but I still have not cut out hand sewing entirely. The hand sewing I do these days is always with embroidery thread and it's super fun. At some point I re-discovered felt. While I'm not as obsessive about felt as I could be (I'm not felting things, nor do I seek out the super-pretty wool felt), I do have quite the collection and I do make a lot of things with it. For a while the things I made with felt were all three-dimensional, and then at one point I started to think about what would happen if I just COMPLETELY indulged my desire to sew little teeny tiny showy stitches on brightly colored felt.


This was the first result. I had so much fun sewing it, soon I was unstoppable. I needed to sew in all different colors! Smaller stitches! More Circles! More Felt!


How about Sequins? Beads? SHINY THINGS!!!


What if I didn't line the circles up? What if I just put them all over! CRAZY!


And for a long time I was just drunk on the texture of the Felt (Especially JoAnn Fabric's felt [the recycled stuff]), the colors of the embroidery thread, and the look of the finished product.

I haven't hung these, I don't have a place for them. I made them so that the color combinations looked super cool to me - but now I have 8 (so far! There will be more!) of these nicely framed felt ... paintings? What do I do with them? So they sit on the floor of my craft room, sad and lonely.

But, oh, they were so much fun to make!