Bumblee Cards

I have been looking forward to this swap. We are very bumblebee friendly in our family and I've often made up sugar drinks to help bees struggling across the patio to give them an energy boost. Baby F is currently obsessed with bees and we have to really watch him as he'll go right up to them to watch as closely as he possibly can. Our gardens/my balcony are planted with as many bee and insect friendly plants as we can stuff in them and we try to have insect boxes and wild areas where they would thrive. There don't seem to be as many bees buzzing around this year though which is slightly concerning.

The fabrics I chose to make the background of the card all remind me of honeycomb in some way, be it the cell like structures or repetitive patten, so although I haven't physically drawn in honeycomb, or a hive, I still wanted it to kind of give off the look of the inside of one. 

For the flower fabric at the bottom, I picked it out of my special bundle of Kaffe Fassett fabrics which Mr DT gave me a few years back. The colours are so vivid that it can be tricky to actually put them into a Stitchscape but for this they worked perfectly as there were the blobby cell shapes in the background and then every now and then there was a fairly realistic flower plopped in the middle. I've fussy cut the flowers to make them fit in on their own so that they become the feature that the bee is aiming for. 

The bees themselves are a piece of black felt I've cut to form the base of the body, and freehand close straight stitches (probably not neat enough to be satin stitches) in yellow and white to make the stripes of colour. Because they are stitched over the felt, it's also a little bit padded so the bee sits proud of the surface of the fabric which also looked lovely. 

The wings were tricky. I wanted them to be slightly ethereal and delicate, and to lift off the surface so they could flap around. When I did butterfly wings before, they were made of three layers of cotton fabric, calico and magazine paper so that was way too thick for my bee wings. However, stash collection to the rescue! Rootling around in my cupboard of all things, I came across some angel paper (I think it's called) which would be absolutely ideal!! 

The only problem was that it wasn't stiff enough to hold itself up and I was worried about the edges tearing if they were handled so I decided to try and glue it to a piece of plastic packaging from my recycling (I learnt from the allotment garden cards that the flat side of a plastic strawberry punnet works wonders) crumpling it up a little bit as well to give texture - although that didn't work and I ended up trying to flatten it again. 

The glue didn't really stick, so I also ended up stitching blanket stitch around the edges of the wings in invisible thread to hold it all together, which actually worked out to be very pretty! It's given a discreet scalloped edge to the wings which I think looks really nice, and definitely worth it as sewing with invisible thread in the evening is a real pain to see!!!

I also stitched the wings down onto the bee bodies with invisible thread so you can't see how they're attached unless you're looking very closely. It's like magic.

Bee legs were added with back stitch, using about three or four strands to make them quite chunky and I also added some black eyes in satin stitch, partly to help hold down that final end of the black felt. Little antennae were popped on and my bees were finished!

These cards take on their own personalities when they are stitched onto the card back and cut out. It's a really exciting moment because it can look really messy when it's all together in one hoop, each card a different direction and loose threads and frayed edges everywhere. Occasionally if I'm stitching on the bus or in a coffee shop in the morning, I get people coming over to see what I'm doing and they don't always know how to react. You end up with a quiet "oh.....that's nice" and a brief exit because it's not a proper picture that they can see and understand. But when the cards on their own, as they are meant to be, suddenly it's a whole different reaction. 

The backgrounds are very simply stitched. The top blue layer just has a few rows of running stitch, starting out as a long line across the card and then breaking up and fading out toward the top, almost like swirls of wind or clouds. 

Below that the squares have been outlined with one straight stitch per side, then bullion knots across the top to edge the fabric layer. 

The yellow cross stitch pattern fabric I have picked out a few colours and added actually cross stitches over the top if those colours appeared. There's a brown colour which I've used two strands for, and a pale yellow which just has one strand. This has made each card completely different because of the larger pattern repeat of the design, but also meant I didn't have to commit to cross stitching the whole piece. French knots have topped the top of this fabric layer. 

For the flower fabric I've outlined each of the blotches with a single strand of back stitch, edged the fabric with a single strand of blanket stitch, added two strand, two twist french knots to be my trailing pollen around the flower and the bee, and then worked satin stitches in the flower petals following the colours and direction of each petal. Pistil stitches have been added for the stamens. 

I really like how each of these cards is slightly different thanks to the placement and design of the larger flower print. It's almost like each is a different photograph of the same bee methodically working its way through a flowerbed. 

The stitch run down for these cards is; running stitch, bullion knots, straight stitch, french knots, cross stitch, satin stitch, back stitch, blanket stitch and pistil stitch.