A year of Beetles.

At the beginning of the year the textile group that I belong to, set
a challenge to be completed each month on the general theme of 'bugs'. I chose beetles, and each month the group chose a colour to be either the background colour as in my case, or the colour of the bug itself.

 I first carved each beetle in a soft rubber to make a stamp and then also carved some vegetation to add to the image.
 Sometimes the colour was too dark to really use a stamped image on it, so I have stamped on some lighter fabric, cut the beetle out and appliqued it to the background.

 I have added painted colours to each insect, in some cases the paint is metallic, as in the two above. After painting, I stitched around the beetles and the leaves in simple machine stitching.

The only insect that I'm not really happy with is the red one shown on the right in the above image. The background colour was to be charcoal, hence the red beetle worked so that it shows up, but I don't like the colour or the shape of the beetle! I might even redo it sometime.

All the fabrics used were my own hand dyed ones, and it was good to find a use for some of them that were dyed many years ago.