Following on from the bark hat I made in response to Fiona’s challenge last week, I thought I would make another, more literal interpretation of the shapes nature had deeply carved into the oak bark. This was the hat from last week for comparison:

And today’s hat, with a little tuft of moss growing out of the crown:

The pinky-brown prefelt that has languished in the bottom of a box for over a year is nearly all gone, just one short strip left…

Fiona Duthie recently posted a challenge to the Surface Design Online Facebook group page, asking us to use trees as our inspiration and make a felt piece using one or more of the techniques from the SDO course.

I am very fortunate to have a wood just over the road from my home, I walk through it most days and the tree species are primarily silver birch, oak and pine. The rough texture of the oak bark particularly caught my attention and was my inspiration for this hat.

Because I used up some prefelt I dyed last year, I think this hat also qualifies for the Felting and Fiber Forum 2nd Quarter challenge to do some stash-busting / recycling. This was the rather uninspiring piece of prefelt, I don’t think it takes too much imagination to see why it waited so long before finding a good use…

Two challenges achieved with a single hat 🙂

This is another hat I have been working on for Fiona’s challenge:

And my other half broke an axe a couple of weeks ago, I am currently working on a bag that will use part of the broken handle for the bag handle – another entry for the FFF challenge 🙂 More on that in a future post…