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).
This approach spun off to the series of
funky birds in my last post.
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).
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