Happy Spring Flowers! Handmade felt and paper and stitch...

Little felty springy flowers!

Annie

I love making handmade felt pictures, sometimes leaving them just as they are, made purely from wool fibres, and sometimes giving the felt some extra texture or colour by sewing into it or adding applique or paint.  And quite often I like chopping it up!

I've recently been combining handmade felt with different backgrounds (calico, canvas, paper) to give it a different dimension, and a firmer body for mounting or hanging, or just sending as a greeting card.

Here's some little pictures I made this week:

I bought a packet of small sheets (A6) rag paper at the Knitting and Stitching show last year to have a play with, that have been sat in a pile of "stuff" ever since.  I've been wanting to get my watercolours out again (not that I was ever any good, or even painted much, but when I did do it I really enjoyed it!).  So anyway I saw them sat there the other day and instead of getting the watercolours out I started randomly tearing holes in them to make apertures for felt.  It didn't quite turn out how I envisaged in my minds eye but it got me thinking.  

 

Then I shoved some of my handmade felt balls in the holes and added stems with a marker pen.  I really liked how they "popped" from the paper.

Then I couldn't resist and turned to my default method of covering things with machine stitching!

And all flowers again.  They spring easily from my imagination, no research required :)  Does that make me lazy?!

I also had a quick go at stitching some flowers in black thread to which I added a piece of yellow handmade felt.  Then it looked top heavy so I added in some colours with acrylic paints. The detail was too small to add more felt with the machine cos it would have been too perforated after two goes over. 

I liked the acrylic paint on the rag paper combined with the stitching - I think the machine stitching almost makes it look like a pen and ink drawing.

It's a shame the colour of the felt doesn't really go with the paint colours at all!  I was just playing, and one thing about the paper is that it's hard to unpick without destroying it!  No where near as forgiving as fabric.

It was a fun bit of playtime and I reckon there are lots more possibilities for this cotton rag paper.  It comes in lots of sizes, am thinking maybe a big piece would make an interesting project.  Or when it all goes wrong a big piece cut into lots of tiny pieces! :-)