Amigurumi Chicks and Felted Birdhouses

I've been absent from the blog posts but not absent from creating content to tell you about.  A few weeks ago I signed up for my first ever online craft workshop.  I am so glad I did.  The craft for the workshop is FELTED BIRDHOUSES and it's taught by craft author, Betz White - one of my favorite craft authors and bloggers.  I loved the little birdhouses she showed and I knew I had to learn to make them.  Betz's workshop is detailed, informative, easy to follow, and professional.  It's awesome!

For the past couple of days, I have been knee deep in felted sweaters, wool blend felt, embroidery floss and glue.  I have completed two of the four bird houses I designed as part of the workshop.  Here they are:

When I complete all four houses (with felted birds attached) I'll post more photos.  Each side of my birdhouse is embellished in a differnt way.  The two above show the side with the "front door."   The tudor style birdhouse is fashioned after my own house and the one of the left is inspired by my vision of a classic little girl's storybook house.

Since I had my bag of fiberfill hanging around my workshop, I decided to switch over to a crochet needle and try out a little AMIGURUMI.  I'm so intrigued by this type of Japanese Crochet.  There are a lot of talented amigurumists out there - if that's not a word, well I've just invented it!  I had no idea if I had the skills to follow an amigurumi pattern.  I'm slightly challenged when it comes to following a pattern.  However, this type of crochet uses mainly single crochet so the stitches themselves are easy.  Counting is a must!  I started simple.

I used this free chick pattern in honor of the Easter season.  Today after school is officially the first day of spring break for my kids.  I'm not sure any of my kids (21, 18, 17, 15) would want a little amigurumi chick, but I'm thinking my really cute, little red-headed niece Maisie might!  So, I got out some light yellow cotton worsted weight yarn and had a go at it.

Here's what I made.

And here is the back side of the little guy.

Even though this was a really easy pattern, there were no instructions about HOW to attach the wings and tail to the body, so I used a matching piece of pearl cotton embroidery thread on a semi-large tapestry needle and I "winged" it.  It doesn't show too much and I knotted the two ends of the thread together tightly to make sure it didn't come apart.

The pattern showed a glued on beak and bead eyes but since I am giving this to an almost 2year old, I didn't want any of the pieces to come off - so I sewed down the felt after gluing it and then I stitched the eyes around a crochet stitch so they are not detachable.

Here's what's up in the next few days... I need to make the felted birds for the birdhouses, continue to work on my applique Blocks #4, 5 and 6 and I DEFINATELY need to get working on my highschool senior's photo albums -YIKES.  Oh yeah, I guess I need to fit in cleaning the bathroom, hanging the laundry, and pulling the vast amount of weeds that have begun appearing in the planting beds, etc etc... it never ends does it?

I am blogging about the graduation photo project over on my other blog, SherYourScraps.

Thats all for today - Cheers!