Last spring Lyn Pfleuger led us through another great felting experience, creating a Monet shawl using dyed wool and silk fibre as well as incorporating pieces of wool and silk fabric. Such fun playing with colour in a painterly fashion. This is a picture of the wool and fabric before the felting process - you have to work big because the final product becomes about 2/3 the size.
You can see some of the detail in this picture. I chose to add stitching to define some of the shapes.
Coincidentally I took a trip shortly after the workshop and had planned to see Monet's gardens at Giverny, so had to take the shawl with me. It turned out to be a very practical addition to my limited travel wardrobe, keeping me warm on cold wet days, as well as dressing up for dinner.
Unfortunately we were unable to get to Giverny because of labour disputes, but it served me well against the cold winds of Skara Brae and London.
I've discovered a new needle-felt addiction totally by happy accident! I was organizing to teach a short needle-felt course for the Sheep Creek Weavers, a wonderful local fibre guild that I belong to. I was trying to source inexpensive supplies and some very kind ladies offered up their stashes of odds and ends of rovings. I ended up with an amazing mix of little bits of different kinds of fibre in a broad spectrum of interesting colours. Most of the pieces were too small to work as I normally do, so I started to play around to see what I could come up with. It became a bit of a colour theory exercise. I picked four or five colours that looked like they would work together, came up with a basic body shape using one or more of the bits and then just embellished from there. WHAT FUN! And very liberating. Each little monster is only a few inches high and doesn't take too long to make, so there are no worries about getting them right. I started to experiment with strange colour combinations, mostly with success. This is definitely an exercise in "more is more." Adding little tiny details makes the difference.
The population is growing rapidly. I've ended up with everything from quirky little birds, to three legged martians, to a very weird bull-seal-snail hybrid. I highly recommend trying it out. It also is a great way to experiment with tiny armatures. You can take it a step farther and wet felt them to give a smoother tighter feel if they are fairly tightly needle felted (seen in the last picture - work gently to begin with to secure the embellishments and remember to use non-rusting armatures).
