All The Buzz (but no yarn)

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I FINISHED THE BUMBLEBEE!!!

 

I finally had an hour of daylight to fuss with attaching the wings. I ran into a few problems. First, I had a wing with only one trailing end on one side of the wire. It was impossible to pull the ends of the wings together that way, so I had to anchor another thread on the opposite wire.

Second, I had this idea that I was going to thread the wires to the back and tack them down back there...yeah...not so much. The bulk going through the linen would have been too much. So I clipped the wires shorter (with my giant kitchen shears, of course), and in the process clipped an end off...see "First". The ends are just kind of hiding under that fringe of the turkey work (TECHNICAL TERM: i.e., "fuzzy stuff").

 

After that, it was just a matter of fiddling around with pulling the two ends together/through, and tightening the veins.

 

Sorry these pictures are kind of blurry; I just have a basic point-and-shoot camera (um, maybe I should read the manual? It probably has some fancy settings) and no swanky macro lens.

If I had the wings to do again (OH PLEASE NO), I would reshape them a bit. See how this guy's wings are straight across the top, rather than curved? You know, WING-SHAPED??

Hunh. My camera can take SOME good close-ups.

Also, I'd make the two ends of the wires meet on the organza before cutting out, rather than having an 1/8"-1/4" gap between them that had to be pulled together. Doing that made the wings kind of pucker or ruffle, rather than lying flat.

 

See what I mean? And real bees' wings don't do that. Makes my bee look kind of like a "bee fairy" or something. =)

Still, I'm pretty happy with him!! And very happy he's done! If anyone is interested in the pattern and instructions, drop me a line at heather at lottloft dot com. You'll need more linen, wire, organza and beads, but there is plenty of the Madeira floss left over, and there is a sample of the beads, wire and organza so you know what you need. If I get more than one request, I'll do a drawing at the end of the weekend.

If you're looking for actual yarn-related "Finished Objects", head over and visit Tami's Ami's:

&nbps;

JiffNotes
The Bumblebee is done! That makes a whopping two projects finished from my Crazy Challenge. That's...sad. But YAY FINISHED BEE!!!