2 Dimensional Felt Pictures: experimenting with colour

 My studio is a little overrun with beautifully coloured wool and luscious fibres. On a related, curious note, one of the steps to create the smooth, wet/needle felted creatures I've been making is to "shave" them - the resultant brightly coloured nubbles and fluff were just too beautiful to throw away. All of this stuff has inspired me to get back to experimenting with colour and texture - florals are a great option for doing just that.

I also have a stash of prefelt that looks quite "quiltish." After flying over farmland and prairie many times, I tend to associate patchwork quilts with planted fields. I've been on a bit of a raven kick for a while so decided to include them taking a bird's eye view.  

After working on these fairly detailed pieces, it was a nice change to create a dominant, plain blended background, experimenting with feathering wool tops and white silk hanky fibres to create a sunrise. Driving around my rural area the other day, I was struck by the number of birds that are hardy enough to overwinter and greet our cold, late, northern sun rise. 

But no matter what I do, I always seem to come back to mountain landscapes. 

A hanging epiphany! 

These pieces are all fairly small (80 to 160 square inches). I decided to keep them as simple wall hangings. After years of experimenting with different hanging methods, I've come up with what I think is an elegantly simple approach. Earth magnets are concealed on the back within small cloth pouches. These suspend the pieces nicely on gridwall display structures and can be easily used on home walls - just hammer nails into the wall - leaving the nails (or screws) protruding  from the wall causes the piece to look like it is floating off the wall. 

Mixed Media Felt Painting

Water and Pebbles 30"'X24"

More experimenting with incorporating felt into a mixed media piece (felt, acrylic paint, silk, bamboo tops, beads)! In this piece I attempted to felt as if painting and paint as if felting. I started with prefelting the felt water piece and sand coloured pebbles. After stitching and needle felting the pieces together, they were further felted. 

The background paint incorporates fibre and was painted to blend with the felt work to form a unified piece.

More Needle-Felt Trolls

Two more new trolls will be moving to the The Creeky Door, a great little store in Bragg Creek. These little guys are a little over a foot tall and are made by needle felting over a wire armature.

Cyrano is a romantic at heart and believes that everyone can find love with a little help.

I may cut a dashing figure now, but it took me years to overcome my trollish ways. I want to help others learn from my experiences and plan to launch a dating advice blog called 'Trolling for Trysts'.

Magnus hails from Troll Falls in Kananaskis which has become a popular family hike.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy hikers (especially after dark), but I worry about the consequences of an unpleasant troll-human interaction. People seem very aware of the importance of protecting wild-life, but we trolls seem to have fallen between the cracks.

Felted Shoulder Fairies

Have you ever wondered who is responsible for all those niggling little temptations whispered in your ear? Buy that dress, eat that cake, you need those shoes, ohhh chocolate ....

Introducing those pesky little shoulder fairies!

These little temptresses are made with a combination of needle felting and wet felting - a hybrid of my armature needle-felt creatures and some techniques from an Andrea Graham workshop.

Truth be told, the inspiration came from some dear friends who continued to whisper temptations in my ear about buying two dresses for an upcoming wedding - just in case you know!

Quirky felted sea life

I recently took a very interesting three day solid form felting workshop with Andrea Graham. It was a fun and inspiring session and I would highly recommend it.
Andrea has developed some different and valuable techniques that combine needle and wet felting. While I have been experimenting with this idea before, her workshop really helped me take a quantum leap.
My previous experimentation with silk lap on felt got me thinking about making a fish with iridescent scales so when I went to the workshop and saw Andrea's whimsical little pods, quirky fish immediately came to mind and voila: the parrot fish and flying fish in the background. I am hooked and went on to make the bubble fish in the foreground and am working on a sea horse - apparently there is a ocean of creatures to explore. Interestingly, the silk lap did not give me the same scaley look on the bodies, presumably because there is not much shrinkage with this method - still attractive though.

Sheep Creek Weavers' Dye-in

 Another beautiful day of creating out doors. Lyn Pfleuger hosted another great day and kindly shared her dyeing expertise. I successfully rejuvenated an old macrame purse with indigo die and have three new pieces of natural dyed silk for making felt scarves - can't wait to get to felting them.

Terri Bibby Saori Weaving Workshop

Much to my surprise I signed up for a Sheep Creek Weavers weaving workshop with Terri Bibby that turned out to be a very happy accident. Not that I don't want to learn how to weave, but I already have too many things on the go. However, this turned out to be the best basic introduction to weaving that I could hope to get. Not to mention, it was an enormous amount of fun. I would highly recommend it to weavers and non-weavers alike.