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…
Both hats are wonderful! (Particularly like the colours and curls in the second one.) Well done on doing two challenges at once – nice one!
Thanks Lyn, I confess it was the colours of the madrone bark that drew me into making the second hat, green, orange and purple is always a striking combo! 🙂
Both are wonderful. I do think you’re really gotten the feel of bark on the first one with what I do have to agree is not the most beautiful piece of felt. And the second hat looks like Madrone bark to me. Sounds like those UFO’s are falling right and left. 🙂
Thanks Ruth, I’m thinking of making a second more literal interpretation of the oak bark but I do like the semi abstract effect of the first hat, I don’t think many people will look at it and think “tree bark”. Well spotted on the second hat, it was indeed madrone bark! 🙂
Great hats Teri! And wonderful use of UFOs for both challenges.
Thanks Marilyn, it feels really good to make beautiful things from pieces of felt that I had relegated to the “ugly” pile 🙂