Making Felt cards

Things are hotting up for the year now the tourist season is almost upon us. My pictures for exhibition at the National Botanical gardens of Wales have now been sent off and it is time to replenish local shops. Today I have been making cards. They are not prints, each one is a mini felt. I've had a request for some floral cards as mothers day is almost here and I've also made some little house in the hills cards.

tree picture complete at last

I've now completed my tree picture. Here are some photographs of it. I needle felted a very simple background and then added the tree with silk for highlights this was all wet felted together and a little stitching added when it was dry. I also took a 'photo in black and white which looks quite weird!
This piece will be in an exhibition at the Welsh Botanical Gardens at the beginning of March. I have called it Flaming Glory.

Inspiration from trees

I love trees. Each one is different and they all give me great inspiration. We live in a very windy and exposed area so our trees are literally shaped by the wind.I have been taking 'photos  in preparation for my next piece of work.
After taking the 'photos I looked at trees on my land and made a very rough sketch. When indoors I made another, more detailed sketch to capture the essence of what I had seen. I did, of course, simplify and use lots of artist licence to change bits. I do not like to try to recreate a replica of what I have seen. I can do that with a camera.

Next I will have to think about colour and how best to tackle creating the image with fibres. I sometimes think it would be much easier to paint them but nothing can compete with the textures of fibre.

summer riot

Hello Everyone. I've recently had lots of people asking how my felts are made so I thought I would tell you the stages involved in making my latest piece which is called Summer riot and shown above.
The first thing I did was create the flower shapes. I did this by needle felting each flower separately. Some of them were felted with solid colour and some had different shades in them which I had to card first. This took quite some time as there are 43 different flowers. Next I added the black centre to each one.
Afterwards I placed the flowers on a blank artists canvas and rearranged them many times until I was happy with them.
Once I knew where each colour would fall on the canvas I could make the background. I started with some semi felted fabric which acts as a blank piece of 'paper'. I wanted to graduate the colours from light at the top to very dark at the bottom and also from warm red at the right and a colder blue on the left so I carefully laid out my fleece. Where colours would meet I carded a little of each together so that there would be no hard join.As I wanted the white area to really stand out I added some silk fibres which would give that area a shine when complete. These fibres have to be arranged on top of the wool fibres and trapped with a very fine 'cobweb' of more woolen fibres.
The next stage was to place my flowers on to the base and , of course, at this stage I decided that I was not quite happy with the outcome and had to move them around some more.At last all the ground work was done!
To secure these layers the whole thing has to be wet felted, being very careful not to move the design around as once the wet felting is complete there is no going back. When the felt was dry I decided to add some stitching to add more texture and make the flowers in the centre stand out more. I machine stitched around some of the flowers and added some shading in the centre. Later I added highlights to some of the black centres by hand with a silver thread.
In all the whole process took three days!