Category Archives: abstract

Bearberry Bark

I was wasting a very happy half hour surfing images on pinterest when I cam across this image of madrone AKA bearberry bark, the colours were so vivid and beautiful I just had to interpret it into a piece of felt!

found on http://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/

This is it laid out after the first few hundred rolls:

And blocking after removing the resists and sealing the cut edges:

And finally, mounted on some stretcher bars:

I just love the zingy-ness of the lime green next to the berry reds and purples. This definitely an energetic piece of wall art!

While waiting for the stretcher bars for the Bearberry Bark haning, I have also been working on some journal covers, adding some needle-felting to the screen-printed gecko cover from a couple of weeks ago and some new nuno felted covers from recycled sari fabrics. The gecko cover looks a little wonky because there isn’t a book inside it yet to stretch it out to a rectangular shape.

Lichen #2 and some machine embroidery

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As promised here are some photos of the second lichen on bark piece, this one took much longer than the first to complete and I think that was largely due to the number of resists that needed cutting and placing (more than 40 in total) but, at last, it is finished.

I have spent most of today working through my UFO (UnFinished Objects) box in preparation for the Sonning exhibition on Sunday. This has almost exclusively involved machine embroidery.

And this piece was inspired by some sunset photos I took in North Devon a few weeks ago:

I plan to use it to cover a ring binder, hence the embroidery design is only on the right hand side.

And I made some leaves to turn the silk flowers into brooches:

I have also been working on a new bag that I think is rather exciting but more on that next time… 🙂

Rainbow Theme Continues….

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I have been making a few of these recently, dyeing the prefelt is a lot of fun and I think the finished effect is very striking and the bright colours make me feel happy. This piece reminds me of aliums as they go to seed so have called it “Rainbow Alium”.

I also managed to mount my coral piece onto a wooden frame ready to go onto Etsy. I decided the white shows off the folds beautifully so chose not to dye this one. Here is the finished piece.

3D Coral Take 2

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In my last post I shared a picture of my latest coral-inspired piece at the pre-felt stage.

I really liked it at this stage and was worried I wouldn’t like it as much once felted but prefelt isn’t particularly strong so felt it I did…

And I’m really pleased with how it turned out, placing the folds closer together is so much more aesthetically pleasing. It’s busy drying at the moment waiting for me to mount it but in the meantime here are some photos from different angles.

Linking up to nina-marie, off the wall Friday

The Aliens Are Coming!

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Alright, of course I am teasing, but Mr TB has nicknamed my latest offering the “Alien Signpost”. This is by far the largest piece of felt I have ever made, it was about 1.5 x 1.2 m (5 ft x 4 ft) when first laid out. It has proved to be quite a challenge, firstly just reaching the middle to lay out the surface decoration but also when trying to move it / roll it up, it was just such handful!

It also took an incredibly long time to lay out the design too, about 8 hours including the time it took to card the wools for the background.

When finished it will be a felt hanging and was based on a monoprint I made on some handmade paper last year.

It is still at the prefelt stage, I allowed it to dry out so I could deal with a couple of prefelts that weren’t adhering as strongly as I would like and needle felt some finer details before fulling. This is what it currently looks like:

I am expecting the colours to become muted during fulling as the paler background colours migrate to the front.

Busy Week

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It’s been another busy week but unfortunately not in a creative way, my day job has been going more than a bit crazy. It’s been as much as I can do to make myself eat something before crashing into bed each evening. This weekend I have really thrown myself into textiles to make up for an otherwise rubbish week. It has been a very productive weekend though…

Mr TB was out on a stag night on Saturday so I put the evening to good use, watching trashy TV while applying wax to an apron I rainbow dyed with blues and greens that morning:

This is the batik pattern I have been doodling, it’s taking a surprisingly long time, 4 hours so far and I’m only half way finished…

I plan to over-dye this with a deep purple and then spray with plasti-dip spray to waterproof it so I have a felting / dyeing apron (no more soggy felter’s middle for me!).

I have finished a couple of C&G “samples” that I started last weekend, the assignment is to explore natural wools with a view to creating a wall hanging but to my mind these pieces are too large (approx 40 x 60 cm / 16 x 24″) to be samples and I like them as wall hangings in their own right:

Do you remember this piece of ice-dyed felt from a few weeks ago?

I turned it into a bag, this is the front flap:

Inside the front flap:

I plan to do a lot of hand embroidery on this piece, mostly blanket stitch around the edges and bit of embellishment on the front flap. If I can get it finished in time I will submit it to the Yarns in the Cathedral exhibition in May.

And finally, some blue tits have been showing a lot of interest in the bird pod I hung a couple of weeks ago. I can’t decide if they are nesting in it or just stealing the cat fluff I put in it as welcome present…

Linking up to nina-marie, off the wall Friday

Completer Finisher

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Have you ever done one of those personality tests? Myers-Briggs, Insights and others? I have completed more of these things than I care to remember but one of the earliest ones labelled me a “completer-finisher”, apparently I am driven to complete tasks which is probably fairly accurate. I get anxious if there’s a deadline I can’t comfortably reach ahead of schedule. This is probably why I am feeling a sense of accomplishment and inner calm today. I have finished 3 projects in the last few of days…

Reversible hooded scarf, this has been a lot of fun to make and now I have worked out an improved pattern I will definitely be making more of these.

A textured laminate piece for my C&G course. This piece I have titled, “Eye of the Storm” as it was based on da Vinci’s “Deluge” drawings. I am still toying with the idea of using fibre etch to reveal some of the coloured cords and adding some embroidery so maybe this one isn’t quite finished yet….?

And my Q1 challenge piece, which was inspired by this painting by Jackson Pollock.

I still can’t decide which way is “up” for this piece…

Fast Flowing Water – Felt Art

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This is another piece I have been working on for a few weeks, it was inspired by the fast flowing water bubbling and rolling over rocks in a stream I came across during a recent trip to the Lake District. I wanted to capture the sense of excited movement and silvery bubbles as they jumbled and tussled over the rocks.

This piece was constructed using a modified version of a technique on her Majesty Margo’s blog. She uses an embellisher to attach silks to the water soluble fabric (WSF) and removes the WSF before felting. I use a similar technique but use a sewing machine to join a wider variety of fabrics (cottons and synthetics as well as silks) and I leave the WSF in place while wet felting it onto a batt of wool roving (the WSF gets washed away during the felting process).

This is image shows some of the lovely textures, the fabrics are crinkled as a result of the wool shrinking behind them. The raised “blobs” are felt balls that have been squashed and rolled to create more pebble-like shapes.

It is still a work in progress but I think it will just be embroidery with lovely shiny and metallic threads to represent the silvery bubbles from here.