Fourth Quarter Challenge

As some of you may know, the ladies of Felting and Fibre Studio post a felting challenge each quarter. For this quarter the challenge is to create something with an autumn theme. I am definitely inspired by the colours of the trees at the moment, just driving to work I want to say ooh and ahh at all the beautiful colours. I am so lucky to have a drive that takes me through deciduous woodlands and along tree lined roads.

I have to admit that I am not at all inspired by Zed’s suggestion that autumn evokes thoughts of damp and decay! Yuck!! I will stick to the lovely autumnal colours of the trees 🙂

Here is my autumn leaf-inspired shawl. It is constructed from rainbow dyed cotton scrim with a thin layer of merino top laid out in different colours with streaks of yellow bamboo fibre as an accent colour and to give some sheen. To this I added about 40 leaf shapes cut out of prefelt and embellished with yarns that I needle-felted to represent the veins on the leaves.

On the reverse I laid out a similar pattern of merino tops and bamboo fibre but without the leaves that took soooo long to cut out and needle-felt with their wool veins.

All of this was wet felted together and I love the result. The yellow bamboo has worked really well and adding a thin layer of wool to both sides of the cotton scrim gives it a lovely soft and warm feel while being thin enough to still drape beautifully.

Is it perverse of me to like the reverse side (without the leaves) better than the front?!!

Little Germs

Those of you from the UK may remember an NHS campaign during the last flu outbreak:

This got me thinking, what if I could make a tissue holder / dispenser in the form of a germ? I  know it’s silly but this idea of brightly coloured “germs” dispensing the tissues that will be their demise still amuses me :o)

Germs have a “bad rap” for being nasty but they’re not all bad and some of them can be funny too – take this little guy…

I decided to use a resist method to create my germ and decorate it with shapes cut from prefelts in contrasting colours. I ended up making 2 resists, one oblong, that will be just large enough to take a packet of tissues and the second the same as the first but with semi-circles on the ends to give it more of bacillus (a type of bacteria) shape.

Green seemed like the obvious choice of colour, after all snot is green… Red or purple for the spots? I had some scraps of red prefelt after cutting lots of leaf shapes for a shawl I have been working on, so red it was.

The smaller resist has definitely worked best, the second resist is more suited to a glasses case, it is just too long for a packet of tissues.

I might try adding appendages to the next one… perhaps a curly flagellum? or some spikes or bumps over the surface?