The Beach – Wet felting

I’ve had a very productive day today, done some dyeing, tried my hand at fabric paper lamination (will cover these in another post) and made quite a bit of progress on “the Beach” too. I have laid out all the top for wet felting, I’m afraid I forgot to take a picture before wetting out but here it is before adding the silhouettes:

And after adding the silhouettes and wet felting to within an inch of it’s life…

It has to be a certain size (40 x 67 cm) to fit on the stretcher bars without losing any elements of the painting so I have been rolling this piece all afternoon, I even had help from Mr TB when my shoulders were too sore to carry on, but I think it is finally there. No more wet felting at least although I am planning some needle felting to help define the silhouettes better.

The Beach – prefelts

After months of pondering, collecting images of sunsets and finally sketching ideas in watercolour I have finally started laying out the fibres for this painting. My new drum carder arrived last week so I have been itching to use it, this felt picture is the perfect foil for my new toy. 🙂

I have decided to tackle this picture as a mosaic of prefelts with inlay for the silhouettes and Kapiti Island. The mosaic technique should give a clean straight line for the horizon although I will actually use 3 strips for the background, the yellow one will be cut in half length-ways and stitched either side of the blue prefelt.

The prefelts were constructed from 2 layers of yellow or blue fibres followed by batts of mixed fibres from the drum carder.

Here is the roving all laid out ready to felt.

And the prefelts all stitched together.

Hopefully I will get to spend a few hours tomorrow adding wisps of roving to the base to bled the blue band and the lower half togeher and making the prefelts for the silhouettes.