Felt art in monochrome !

I thought I would share this challenge with you (and it WAS a challenge). I belong to an art team on etsy who are setting monthly challenges. This month was to create a piece in monochrome. As you know this means using variations on only one colour. Anyone who is familiar with my work will realise how hard this was for me.
The obvious choice is black, white and grey but that would be too gloomy for me so I settled on orange. Here is my colour palette

I sketched a simple landscape for my design and needle felted the fibres loosely in to place. I found it tricky getting enough contrast for different elements to be clear so added silk fibres to help.

The next stage was to wet felt which ,of course, tends to blend colours together so did not help with making a clear image. Happily the final stage of adding stitching did help to define things and this is the finished piece.

I must admit I did miss being able to use black thread in the stitching and am almost certain that I won't be repeating the exercise. I probably did learn something about use of different tones though. Why not try it for yourself?

felt paintings - 2

Hi
Yesterday we covered the first stage of creating a felt ' painting'. Today we will go through the wet felting stage for those of you who are not familiar with it.

The first thing you need to do is place your needle felted picture on to a bamboo blind. If you are working on a small scale a sushi mat will be fine. Next you need to take your courage in both hands and dribble warm, soapy water all over your needle felt. Don't worry. The fact that the barbed needle has been used is enough to secure your fibres and keep them where you want them to be as long as you only dribble or spray the water.

Next, cover the wet  needle felt with bubble wrap. Some people use netting at this stage but I find that the woollen fibres will often felt in to the net  causing distortions when you try to remove it. Now starting in the centre press hard on the bubble wrap and moving to the edges press out any air bubbles. This will ensure good contact between the woollen fibres and pre felt so they can bond together. When you are satisfied that there are no more pockets of air spray a little soapy water on top of the bubble wrap to make it slippery. With your hand pressed flat, rub in a circular motion. Start gently and gradually increase pressure. Check your felt from time to time by lifting a corner of the bubble wrap and gently pushing your design with your finger tip. If it moves around rub more. If it is stable you can go on to the next stage. The rubbing can take anything from 15 minutes to an hour or more depending on the size of your felt and how hard you are working.

Once your design is stable you can roll up your bamboo blind with the felt and bubble wrap inside it. Have an old towel to hand as this squeezes some of the water out and you could end up with wet feet! Now roll the package backwards and forwards on the table. Count as you roll and roll for about 20 times. Unroll the blind and check your felt. There may be wrinkles in it. If there are gently smooth them out. Now you need to turn the felt so that one side is towards you. Be very careful when you pick it up as it is still quite fragile and will easily stretch out of shape. Roll up and roll as before. Turn again so the felt is upside down and repeat the rolling. Do the same with the last side. You have now rolled in all four directions and your felt should begin to feel firmer. It is usually a good idea to give it another rub and repeat the rollings again. After that place a plastic bag on your hand, remove the bubble wrap and rub again. Now repeat the rolling without the bubble wrap. By now the felt should feel more compact and thicker it should have also shrunk a little.

If you have completed the previous stages correctly  the felt should be quite stable and there is no danger of it falling apart. Fill a bowl or sink with cold water and rinse the bubbles from it. You will probably need to change the water 2 or 3 times until the water runs clear.

Gently squeeze the excess water from the felt. The next stage surprises a lot of people but it hardens the felt and makes a really strong fabric. You need to scrunch the felt up and throw it repeatedly and quite forcefully on to the table. From time to time straighten the fabric out and fold it differently before throwing again. After a time the felt will develop little bumps all over it. When this happens your task is complete. It may have pulled out of shape but you can pull it back in to the correct shape by gently tugging on the appropriate edges.

Here is my felt after wet felting. If you compare it with the photograph  of the needle felted piece in yesterday's post you will see the difference between the two. 

Place your soggy felt somewhere warm to dry ( it can be put in a washing machine, on a spin cycle first). When dry it will be ready for stitching which I will cover tomorrow.

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!