Monday Project - Textured Fabric Bookmarks

One of my favorite things to do is to texture fabric by adding embroidery and beading.  I'd love to do this to a piece that's big enough to make something like a blouse with, however ..... reality and time constraints mean I texture pieces the size of items like bookmarks!  For this one I used a Christmas fabric - lots of them work really well with this technique.

Materials:
*small piece of fabric
* small piece of felt
*embroidery floss - for this bookmark I used DMC's special effects in copper and silver colors
*size 12 perle embroidery thread (you won't need this if you attach the fabric to its felt backing with the sewing machine)
*seed beads
*pinking shears

1.  Cut a 2 1/2 by 7 inch piece of fabric.

2.  Embroidery parts of the fabric that will stand out.  You can embroidery around the outlines of everything, but for this piece I thought it would look best to outline the moon and stars.

3.  Iron under each edge of fabric about 1/4 inch.  Look at your fabric's pattern and determine where beads would add texture.  Sometimes this can be using beads to outline motifs - for my fabric it seems perfect to use the beads to accent the circles on the trees.  If you use seed beads, the bookmark will still be thin enough to use in a book.

4.  Pin fabric to a 2 1/2 by 7 inch piece of felt that you've cut with pinking shears.  If you have beads near the edge, you'll have to hand sew the fabric to the felt.  I used a large running stitch to do this.  If you don't have beads near the edge, you can do this with a sewing machine.

Here's another bookmark I'm working on - I'm planning on outlining all the foliage with copper thread and then adding in a clear seed bead here and there.

Happy Creating!  Deborah