felt paintings, adding linear embellishment.

I always add stitching to my felts but decided I would like to add some kind of raised linear embellishment to show the lie of the land. I intentionally left some areas of my felt uncluttered so I would be able to add them without making the finished art work too fussy. Th

is is the felt with no stitching. I think you will agree, it looks a little flat. Next I added my usual free machine stitching to add tree branches etc. I took a photograph of the back of the work so you can clearly see the amount of stitching added by machine.

Next came the tricky bit. I knew what I wanted the raised lines to look like but didn't know how to achieve them. I did some experimentation on felt scraps. Here they are in my fabric art journal.

In the end I decided I liked bullion knots and couched yarns. One small problem. I didn't know how to stitch bullion knots. I spent Friday evening practising and finally got the hang of it. I used bullion knots with couched yarn in between them  as well as on their own. Here is the finished piece.

And a close up of some of the hand stitching.

Abstract felt art challenge.

This month's art team challenge was 'abstract'. This is a little out of my comfort zone and took many hours of thought before I got started. Mostly I dislike art that is just unidentified blobs of colour so decided to go with representational abstract. I came up with this.

I decided that I wanted a simple image and for some reason I had the title 'clear blue' in my head. I went for 3 dimensional pebbles with a suggestion of  shallow water running over and around them. Just because an image is simple it doesn't have to be boring. Simple images give you the opportunity to go wild with texture. In this piece I have the 3D pebbles as well as two different types of  silk, wool neps, soya bean fibres, yarn and hand stitching. It took some time to put together and had to be felted very firmly but I am quite pleased with the result. Here is a close up which shows the textures better.