etsy mini

Wednesday 18 June 2014

layered felt technique

We've had some beautiful sunny weather recently and I wanted to make something summery. I decided on a stitched flower garden with a hazy felt background and thought I would share this technique with you.
This actually has six layers to it.
First I started with a prefelt as a base. Next I added areas of different coloured merino. I started with pale colours at the top and worked down to stronger colours to give the bottom half a feeling of weight. Next I carefully arranged silk fibres over the merino making sure that the silk overlapped the joins in colour of the layer below. Then more merino. This time the fibres were pulled in to a cobweb thin film so that the underneath layers were still visible. I used the same colours as before but overlapped the colours slightly. The 5th layer was a sprinkling of wool neps at the bottom of the picture. This gives the impression of distant flowers.
The whole picture was then wet felted. I did not needle felt first because I wanted the layers to blend together more than usual. The final layer was the embroidery.
Working like this gives a real sense of depth to a piece and the way the colours blend together reminds me of a watercolour.

3 comments:

  1. That felt is just beautiful. There is so much involved in felting and you tell us how you do it all so well. Nice work.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you Shirley. Glad you found it interesting.

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  2. Love seeing your process first hand!

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