Fourth Quarter Challenge 2015

I’m still feeling a bit direction-less on this challenge, ambling from one idea to the next but I have at least managed to commit to making a couple of pieces of felt this week, both based on the challenge.

The first is a small hanging based on this photo of some cone flowers (rudbekia):

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My idea for this picture was to use different tones and shades to visually bring some of the flowers forward while sending others into the background.

Using the ball of ochre coloured wool in the middle of this photo I blended some different tones and shades by adding different quantities of white or black.

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And used these batts to make some prefelts:

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I confess I cheated a little – the yellow in the middle is not a tone or shade of the ochre colour, the original colour is the square 2nd from right on the bottom row.

These prefelts were cut up and arranged on a square of black commercial prefelt:

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After lots of rubbing and a little bit of rolling all the pieces are firmly attached and it is ready for some finer details to be added.

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I quite like the jolly, cartoon-like effect but think I can make the flowers look more 3-dimensional with some shading using the left over prefelts and pieces of the batts.

This weekend I also made a start on a hooded jacket, again applying the challenge instruction of using just one colour plus black and white. There’s still some way to go but here is a little taster…

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Rummaging through my stash I found some bundles of carded natural merino batts in white and dark brown, I had an idea that using batts would speed up the layout, which it did, but any time I saved in the initial lay-out was lost needle-felting more wool over the thin spots at the prefelt stage. 🙁

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I attached a hood to my favourite dress resist. Masking tape is great for making temporary changes to resists. You can see where I have permanently altered this resist to add sleeves using duct tape.

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Laying out the wool with some lovely Wensleydale locks for extra texture and some white mulberry silk for a little bit of sheen.

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Starting to layout the front sections:

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With a little luck I hope to post the finished jacket next time.

Q4 Challenge and Winkworth Arboretum

The final Felting and Fiber Studio Form challenge for this year centres around tone and shade, mixing white and black with a single colour. Although I had a small hand in creating this challenge I know I am going to find it difficult to retrain myself to a single colour. I can’t resist the drama created by placing complimentary colours next to each other.

Last weekend we paid a trip to Winkworth Arboretum, a National Trust property just south of Godalming in Surrey, a beautiful place, especially with all the trees just starting to turn red and gold, and definitely worth the excursion if you are an NT member. These are just a few of the photos I took.

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I am finding myself strangely drawn to the last image, I think it is the feeling that path is inviting the viewer to some unseen destination.

Initially I had an idea to create a triptych wall hanging depicting a woodland scene with one panel each of yellow, orange and crimson but I am already wandering off on another tangent. I might still come back to that idea though as I still think it has “legs”.After having a play with the colour tools in GIMP (a free photo-editing software that is similar to Photoshop), these were the front-runners:

I quite like the last one which is more of a grey-scale with the greens added back in, although the third image down, also has merit, that one is essentially a posterised version of the last image but I am finding it looks like there is snow on the ground while the trees are in leaf. The greens are also showing splashes of blue and yellow rather than just shades and tones.