B is for Bear...

I've been on an embroidery kick for the past year. Last year around this time, I started on a very special project for the newest little one in my life, my beautiful nephew Braydon. This project took me a long, long time... to be exact, the length of the entire first three seasons of Heroes streaming from netflix! I must say, the first two seasons were definitely the best, the show seemed to go downhill after that....

Anyway... the time spent was well worth it just to see the look on his parents faces when they opened the gift at Christmas.

Without further ado...

To make the project even more of a challenge, my nephew just had to have the letters "y" and "n" in his name. Actually, the "y" panel presented much less of a challenge then "n" did. Just try finding an animal that starts with the letter "n" that a small child will recognize... I dare you.

The panels were constructed entirely of felt. Each piece was drawn by hand, then cut, and hand-sewn onto the panel. I added some touch & feel components to each panel too, including a silky fabric for the fish and the carrot, a fluffy fabric for the cloud, buttons in the shapes of airplanes, a duck, and apples, and some plastic under the alligator and the moon to give them a crunchy sound when touched. All of the panels were then bound into a book. The binding was also stitched by hand. I was a bit tired by that point, and I think it might have even been Christmas Eve, so a picture was never snapped of the book after binding.

The project was inspired by a post I read on Craftster.org, one of the best crafting websites around.

xoxoxo