Category Archives: wet felt

Adding Dimension

This quarter, the FFS challenge is to add dimension to our felt, on the face of it I should find this challenge easy, almost everything I make is 3D in nature but that rather seems to defeat the purpose, after all, surely a challenge should be just that! 🙂

Last weekend I had a mini epiphany; I really like the effect of shibori felt like the brooch below but using the “tie in a stone/button/marble technique” is not very practical when you are creating a 3D object over a resist as you need extra felt to stretch over the inclusions and it invariably makes the surrounding felt uneven too. I woke up on Sunday morning and my first thought was to create these cup shapes separately and then attach them to the main piece of felt. Is it really sad that I am now dreaming about felt?

This was the piece made with the separate resists. It was very slow work making these 7 little cups and I’m not sure I will use this method a lot but it was interesting to try and I’m happy with the result.

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This box is quite large, just shy of a foot square and 5 inches tall.

I wanted to make a small bowl inspired by this pine cone, it started out as a bowl but I clearly wasn’t concentrating while laying out the flaps and spikes so it became a pod instead… 🙂

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Finally, I started working on a new vest top that I have been thinking about since attending a dress-making course with Cristina Pacciani at the beginning of July, it still needs some shaping in the back and around the collar but you can already see all the texture from the silk and felt ropes laid under the silk. Originally I was going to make this in royal blue chiffon but then decided white habouti would better showcase the different textures.

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What are you planning for the 3rd quarter challenge?

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:

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

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And finally, mounted on some stretcher bars:

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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.

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