The King's Speech vs. Black Swan: How (not) to make a pincushion

The King's Speech was an awesome film, but my swan is adorable.

I thought I'd just breeze through this week's Iron Craft challenge. Bwahahahahahahahaha!!! (That's the sound of me rolling around on the floor laughing like a mad woman.) The challenge was "The Oscars". It could be anything film related. Anything. Sounds sooooo easy. And it would have been if there hadn't been a whole series of craft fails...

This pincushion started out life (in concept) as a hairpin made out of Shrinky Dinks. I stamped, and shrunk, and painted that tiny chunk of plastic. And then I realized that there was no way anyone could tell what it was supposed to be, which was a crown. (I really, really loved The King's Speech. And I have a very long-lasting crush on Colin Firth. Anyway...)

I started looking around for something else I could do. My eyes landed on my pile of felt. I stamped a crown on a bit of white.

My lovely crown stamp.

Aaaand...this is how that turned out. Kind of hard to see, right. It's not the photo. It really was that hard to see.

The amazing disappearing crown.

I persevered. Normal, sane people would have given up at this point. I'm apparently neither. I cut out that crown in the shape of a speech bubble. I also cut  3"x3" squares out of black and pink felt. I thought that the crown would show up better if put against the pale pink. My eyes are rolling at this point, too.

Some felt pieces, including the speech bubble.

Of course, the black side needed something, too.  I free-handed a swan on a piece of white felt with disappearing ink and cut it out.

I do like my swan. If nothing else, the swan is cute.

I then used Elmer's Glue-All to glue the decorative pieces onto the background pieces. And then I hot-glued the bits that wouldn't stay down. I do have fabric glue, but...well...yeah. I guess I had little to no brain function while making this.

Gluing it all down.

I then hot-glued three sides of the squares together, forming a pocket, and stuffed it with batting before gluing the fourth sides together. And, here's another fail, I tried to do a blanket stitch around the edges using a hot pink embroidery floss. That's so hard to do...through hot glue! I picked the few stitches I had done out. I then had a hole to cover. I poked it larger and thread a tassel through. I think the tassel is jaunty and doesn't look at all like I'm covering a mess. Yeah.

At this point, I realized that that crown wasn't becoming more visible. I decided to add some dimensional fabric paint.

Still couldn't see the crown, so I decided to paint over it.

The paint came out a bit gloppy (is that a word?) and added some rhinestones as a distraction technique. Did it work?

Hrm...

Okay, so now we're finished. Good times, right?

A bit better.

Just for fun (and laughs) -
Ingredients:

• Shrinky Dinks Rough & Ready
• Crown stamp
• Silver ink
• Pink acrylic paint
• Hairpin
• E6000
• Blue ink
• Felt (pink, white, black)
• Disappearing ink
• Scissors
• Hot glue gun and sticks
• Batting
• Embroidery needle
• Embroidery floss
• Dimensional fabric paint
• Rhinestones
• Elmer's Glue-All
• Tassel

I have no idea why I chose to do a pin cushion. Maybe it's my subconscious telling me that I need to learn to sew.