When I saw my sister last month and she had told me that she'd lost her only needle half way through stitching our Mum's birthday present, I knew exactly what I needed to make as her birthday present.
I had the pattern from a magazine cutting given to me and I changed the picture to this lovely oriental dragonfly. The colours in the dragonfly co-ordinated perfectly with some felt that I had bought a while back.
After I had stitched the design I had to work out how to put the rest of it together. I have to get it right in my head and picture it before I start constructing and this particular project took a while.
I had to cut a square of felt the same size as the cross stitch design and stitch the two together. Then the pattern told me that I had to stitch a backing piece of felt on to cover the design. I don't trust my stitching so I decided to stick it together with bondaweb. After I ironed it on the wrong side (!!) I worked out how it was going to go and managed to make it stay bonded together.
I then cut some contrasting coloured felt and trimmed the edges with the pinking shears. I sewed this through the case to create the leaves for the needles to be stored on.
I am very happy withe the result and would like to make some more now. My sister was pleased with it too. The only thing I should have added was a small fastener but I realised this too late and there was no way of adding it after I had bonded the middle layer together.