My New Love!

I wanted to let you know what I've been up to these last few weeks - I've always been a fan of embroidery, in particular ribbon embroidery. Beautiful embroidery just seems to be a lost skill these days - my late Mum had some gorgeous embroidered doilies and table cloths and as a young girl, she taught me how to master a lot of the intricate stitches. Unfortunately these days, a lot of people are so busy working and with family commitments that there's not a lot of time to spend on the art.

I sometimes spend my precious little time of an evening(as most of you know I also work full time in a regular day job) browsing the web for ideas for my bears - I love to look at beautiful things, whether it's fashion and costumes, collectable art figures, Faberge eggs and jewellery ideas. I also happened to chance upon ribbon work as a 3-D art form!

I was so struck by the beautiful images - fanciful designs created from a flat ribbon! Who would have thought ribbon could be crafted into such wonderful pieces?

And so I discovered ribbon work - and in particular the awesome work of Candace Kling!I've since purchased her wonderful book 'The Artful Ribbon' - jam packed full of easy to understand tutorials, loads of tips - an excellent book if you're interested in the art.

I want to incorporate ribbon design as another aspect of my bears - in fact I've been making a few 3D designs so far, and am planning to launch a new panda in the next week or so (another from my Imperial Panda series) using a lot of the ribbon work techniques I have learned.

In the meantime, here's some of the wonderful designs created with simple ribbon - you can see why I'm now hooked!