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.

Horse of a Different Colour

My first horse commission! It definitely stretched my imagination. The objective was to paint a customer's horse - but not realistic: something abstract with bright colour (pink and blue). The first challenge was to make sure that the face looked "right." I am not a horse person, but have enough friends who are to know that they see horses with as much recognition of correct proportion and detail as the rest of us have for human faces. So ... I decided to start with a sketched study and run it by the customer. All went well and my customer confirmed if looked like "Echo" so I thought I was well on my way. The down side of doing this is that Echo's face ended up more representational that I originally planned - I somehow felt committed to the detail once I had it, so opted to rely on colour to create abstraction. 

Then came dealing with the colour. I think I spent as much time on this piece as any other painting that I have ever done. I experimented a lot with the impact of adjacent colours and am happy with the final product. I am especially pleased with the colour detail (see last photo). The concept was to have Echo echoed in the background, incorporating hints of the ears, head and main into it.

Fibre Embellishments in Felt

I took a trip up to Legacy Studio last week and came away with lots of inspiring beautiful dyed fibres to experiment with.
I made two tea cozies trying out some of the fibres as well as adding some new top handles.
The rainbow effect was created with rainbow dyed silk lap. I added some coloured wool and pulled silk in the second version (on right) to accentuate the rainbow colours. I love the sheen and wiggly effect of the silk lap caused during the shrinking of the wool - it reminds me iridescent scales.


I also created some texture by adding glass bead resists during the felting process (bottom). I drizzled some dyed banana fibre to add some purple and orange "threads" as well some purple bamboo tops. Fun, fun, fun!