This is a photo of the tortoise I sent Linda B

I call him a ‘Knight In Shining Armour”. This came to mind as soon as I saw the photo. I also knew that I had both types of leather in my stash and just took it from there. The arms are of mesh ribbon which I randomly stitched over. I used an overdyed thread for the face. The “Knight” was stitched as a slip and attached to the background fabric. I bought this fabric while on vacation in the US. The green ‘trails’ on the fabric represent seaweed washed up from the ocean. I added a variegated wool ‘nest’ to represent a bunch of colourful washed up weeds. The butterfly and ladybug were added for fun. I had an absolutely great time working on this!

Joyce D

After I printed off the picture, I let everything percolate for a day or two or three…. Although the picture had a lot of browns in it, any time I visualized the piece it was in green and yellow. So my tortoise became green and yellow. I started by painting quilt batting with acrylic paints mixed with textile medium as per the instructions in the “Quilting Arts” magazine. I painted two pieces, each about 5 x 7 — one in greens and yellows and the other in reds and browns (for another project). I had orginally intended to only cut out the shell from the batting but as I started to piece it together the rest of the pieces wanted to be batting as well. I hand-stitched the pieces onto the background fabric (a piece I had that I though looked a lot like small pebbles on a path) using varigated brown #12 pearl cotton. The outside is a knotted cretan stitch or at least my version of it. The upper shell was all one piece with the segments outlined in the same brown but in stem stitch. I used a variated yellow #8 pearl cotton to create the lines on each segment. Once I had the eyes and mouth on the little fellow, I pinned him up to look him over and there was something missing. I needed more texture in the legs. Since I wanted it to be scale-like, I thought beads. I did the green and yellow beads first, thinking to highlight the scales. Then I hung it up again but it still wasn’t the tortoise I was envisioning. Back to the beads. I took flat red-brown and black beads and continued around the shiny scales. Now it was right. Then before I could do any more damage or embellishment, I stitched him down onto a piece of ivory cotton with a layer of thin batting in the middle and mailed him off to Sue.

Here is the photo of my interpretation of the tortoise. You didn’t expect to see an actual tortoise rendition from me did you?

I used the geometric units in the picture, the octagon and triangle shapes from the shell, on the ground fabric. The yellow circles are used in the embroidered portion. The embroidery is done on a piece of felted silk and wool rovings. The felting was done using the method for making silk paper. I used the colors that were in the photograph and did embroidery in silk, cotton and metal threads with beading throughout.

The embroidery was attached to a thin card with double stick tape. The back of the postcard is off white cotton fused to heavy weight pellon and applied with double stick tape to the back of the embroidery. The postcard was stamped and hand cancelled at the post office and will be mailed in a separate envelope.

Eleanor