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!
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