Experimenting With Layering and Editing in Feltmaking

Annie

Since my wonderful class at West Dean I've been having a play and have made various samples to test out ideas.   The most relevant to this project was this one:

I like the way the colours peeped through the open weave.  Still vibrant but layered and more interesting.

For this picture I started by having a go at randomly "making marks", with the intention of turning it into a picture of something later in the process (most likely flowers I thought at the time, as that's what I like doing!).

I used fibres, prefelts, fabrics, yarns and also some of my handspun yarn:

Some of the colours in my materials were my usual colours but others were a bit more experimental for me such as the purple.  I really like the dark blue spotty fabric which I think is from an old scarf.

Once I'd done a bit of mark making I started to form a flowers composition. After a while I thought it was too much so I employed the editing / whiting out idea. For this I used some white open weave cotton fabric which I pulled several strands from to make it a little more see-through and laid it over the areas I wanted to "knock back".  The photos below are after felting but it shows the idea.  After felting it was a lot more see-through than when it was laid out.

I thought I'd finished laying out by picture 4 in the images below but then I thought I'd push it and added some pink merino flowers over the top then outlined them with white yarn.

Here is an example of some of the layering in the picture, before and after felting.  Obviously I'd laid some other bits on top before felting but it shows the idea.  I like looking at small areas of a bigger picture to think how little passages could be used in later work.  I think this open weave blue over white could represent windows in a skyscraper maybe.

Here are some other details photos:

During the process I covered up some lovely pieces of handspun yarn and some nice shapes but overall I think the sacrifices were worth it to get more depth and layering into the picture.  Overall I'm not sure it's my ideal colour palette or composition or quirky enough design but that doesn't matter.  With every experiment I find more things to try out and get more ideas for future works.  But most important it's great fun to do.

Here is a final photo of the whole thing.  The ratio of height to width is not ideal but I do like the way the blue vase hangs off the bottom: