rosiepink: January 2017

Work In Progress

Annie

Firstly, a belated Happy New Year to everyone :)

I've decided that now that the plastering is all done and we'll soon have freshly painted walls, I want to make some flowers or landscape pictures for the house. Maybe some accessories too. The picture above is a small sample (one of many to come) to flesh out some ideas.

As you know mum and I don't really have a set "style" in our feltmaking as we don't like to make the same thing over and over which is why we often experiment and see what we can do with our materials.

I've been playing a bit with odds 'n' ends including getting my spinning wheel out again after years of neglect. I didn't really get into spinning before but I'm excited about it again and have made a few skeins. I've booked a lesson for next week so I can find out more. Currently my yarns are for adding texture and colour into hand made felt so they don't have to be technically perfect or balanced - just pretty to look at and incorporate as embellishment to felt. They wouldn't be suitable for knitting (far too springy!) but they make great fluffy pom poms!

The "skein" above looks a bit like a woolly brain to me. I wonder if that's what mine looks like! :)

I'd like to make a sort of felt based textiles scrapbook to hold my ideas and samples together. Not sure how it will look yet. Until now I've had things pinned all over the walls and everywhere but I'm finding that a bit overwhelming now. I thought I'd try a bit of calm and organisation for a while. Not sure how it will work out but worth a go! I thought I could try making small random samples of all the different ways I can think of to represent say flowers. Flowers are a favourite subject of ours as they can be plucked straight from the imagination and can be any shape, colour or size you please, and they are never "wrong". A small boundary like that helps me focus as I have a bit of a wild imagination! This project will also encourage me to use up and try out some of the random fabrics, yarns, odds n ends I've accumulated over the years (and I've accumulated a lot!!)

I've started with a small picture of some flowers / stems in a glass using prefelts and a little bit of fabric. It's fairly simple but I think I'll go on to stitch it and push it a bit further. These samples will be all about play and developing ideas to feed into further work. Hopefully some of which will make it onto my walls at some point.

The next one isn't recognisable as anything yet (and maybe it never will be!). I started by laying lengths of my handmade "yarn" across some merino fibres and felted it all together. Then I needlefelted (on the embellisher) some natural scrim over the top to knock back the colours a little bit. I like the effect. Needs something else yet though. Maybe some running stitches. When I laid it out I was thinking masses of flowers, but Mum thinks it looks coastal. Perhaps it does - a bit like the stones and seaweed when the tide goes out.

Here is the back. I must remember that the embellisher is good for pushing loops of fibres up from the back when you work the piece front side down. Love it!

The other thing I've been trying to do is a little bit more machine embroidery practice. Even a quick sketch is better than nothing. I snapped these pretty little plants in the work canteen the other day and free motion machine stitched them when I got home onto a scrap of canvas. I forced myself to switch off my interfering brain and just stitched as fast as possible. It's not perfect and is not from the same angle as the photo but it's OK. And it's all practice!