From my Studio - a new ribbon rose Panda!

Last week I showed you my newest love - creating beautiful ribbon roses. I now want to show you my latest panda - Li Wei - who is now available here directly from my website here.

As you can see, she is adorned with wonderful ribbon roses I created using quality ombre ribbon in muted dusky pink and an understated maroon. These ribbons have to be seen to be believed - I've tried to capture their amazing hues in these photos: spectacular is an understatement I'm thinking! The dusky pink gives off a shimmering gold and violet tone, and the maroon also gives a shimmering gold and vibrant ruby red tone - very striking against the muted maroon base colour.

Incidentally, in keeping with her theme of Imperial Chinese princess, Li Wei's Chinese name means 'beautiful rose' - I always love researching and choosing just the right name for my bears and pandas - it's funny, sometimes a name will come to me straight away, and other times it will take a lot of musing over several names as I create before the right one fits.

I hope you love what I've done with my new found craft! I'm looking forward to incorporating quite a few more bears decorated in floral costumes in the future!

Thanks for visiting!

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!