Redbeard is just shaking his head, but I’m rather pleased with my most recent adventures with felt. I got it into my head about a week ago that what I needed to do, what I really need to do was, I needed to try to make needle felted tulips. I finally got a chance to give it a try, and am pretty happy this first effort. Of course, I didn’t think to take pictures until I was nearly done, but here is one in-progress picture and the final product:

Bulb flowers are for sale everywhere here, usually in small pots that have just enough soil to let them grow, but not enough to let them grow very large. There are lots of pygmy daffodils here. 🙂 Anyway, my idea was to do the same thing with these felt flowers. So, rather than a vase, they are in a little pot.

The small scale of these was a bit challenging, and I am still thinking about how to best shape the flowers themselves. The thing that I thought would be a problem – having stems that were strong enough to stand upright – turned out to be no problem at all. I figured I’d have to somehow put wire into the stems, but they are easily standing on their own.

Also, I’d like to pretend that I planned for this, but I have to admit that it is sheer dumb luck that I picked tulips instead of some other flower. Because tulips have a naturally thick stem compared to most other flowers, I think my tulips look better than if I had started with, say, roses. In short, chunky is okay here. I think.

The Netherlands also has these traditional tulip vases that have small holes for each individual stem instead of a big opening at the top. I may have to try that for my next set.