Flowers and a crewel owl

 One of the first arts I learned was stamped cross stitch when I was really young.  Since then I have learned many needle arts, but my favorite is crewel.  I have not worked a crewel piece since the kids were little.   I used to take them to the "duck pond" (a park in Glendale, AZ) and while they were skating and feeding the ducks I would work on an embroidery piece.  After sorting through my many, many UFOs last month I pulled out this owl piece to make for April's birthday.  All hopes of completing it by the 20th of this month were dashed when I really looked at the instructions and found that all of the snow sections were *gasp* turkey work.  This stitch is very time consuming and labor intensive and look at all the snow!!!!!!!!  I started it on the first and finished it last week.  Not bad!  The embroidery work is complete, but I still need to back it and get it ready to take with me in 3 weeks.

 A close up of the owl and the SNOW:

 Cleaning off my table I found a Quilting Arts magazine (April/May 2011 issue) in which I had marked a project that caught my eye.  That led to sorting my small fabric scraps (which is so handy now, I'm glad I took the time) in order to have color schemes for this project.  I played with several color combinations since I had my machine set up for free motion embroidery.  I have one background piece left to work on then I can decide what I want to do with these pieces.  They are approximately 6 inch square since I already had some batting cut in that size.  Needless to say even though I've made four of these so far I STILL haven't made much of a dent in my supplies............ I keep trying!  

Green flowers and purple dots:

 Blue flowers and red dots:

 I think this is my favorite so far:  Yellow flowers and pink dots:

Close up of the flower:

Pink flowers and green dots:

 I had leftover circles from the pieces so I played with them on the felted cover I had made a while back.  I like the flowers and think I'll use them as much as possible: