Bokja Design

Hoda Baoudi and Maria Hibri are the creative force behind Bokja. Inspired by antiques, vintage furniture, ancient tapestries and textiles. I love the beautiful colours, unique patterns and wonderful craftmanship that their products ooze. The store is located in the Saifi district in downtown Beirut. 

 Here are some sofas I have covered with my own designs. I constantly use photoshop to see what my designs would look like on a product. 

My Embroidery X

Here are some of my hand embroidery samples. I experimented with a range of stitch to include line stitches, darning stitch, variations of back stitch, stem stitch, chain stitch, cross stitch, feather stitch, satin stitch, fly stitch, couching stitch and lastly detached stitch. Wow as you can see that's a lot of stitch and therefore I am pretty well practiced now. Although I am a printer I also enjoy hand embroidery and thoroughly enjoyed this project. I included sequins, dried flowers, ribbons, beads and raided my mums vintage button collection. 

  

Dry Felting

Here is some of my latest work. We had a felting project at university and I ended up using the embellisher to dry felt. I was inspired by the children's book Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy that a friend recommended. I drew some dogs and scanned them into the computer, then had them digitally printed onto transfer paper which I ironed onto some fabric. I previously screen printed patterns of doors, chimneys and garden gates which I had felted onto and embroidered into. I finished off the designs with some little hats made from felt for the dogs. I am really pleased with the outcome. I proceeded to cover an old chair and I thought the samples looked good displayed in these embroidery hoops. X 

Wild English Flowers X

The weather has been so beautiful this weekend which always makes everything seem better and although I have a big deadline on Wednesday I still managed to find time to spend yesterday afternoon in the park with my friends. When the weather is sunny I like to visit the botanical gardens in Victoria park. Here are some flowers I painted using a mixture of watercolour paints, oil pastels, ink and glitter-glue.