Sketching with fibres and fabrics

Above: Fun with making & felting carded batts

Annie

Hello.  Anyone know where the first 3 months of the year went?  I appear to have lost them somewhere!  Hope you are all having a lovely and creative year so far. 

Life has been busy, busy, busy (mostly in a good way so I'm not complaining!) so when it comes to getting big creative work done I'm not finding enough time at the moment.  Am planning to change that but in the meantime I've just been doing things in small, easy doses and simply enjoying the process of "sketching" with fibres and fabrics etc.  Not planned pieces, just whatever comes. Same as you might doodle in a sketchbook with paints or pens. No pressure. Feels nice :) Here I'm sharing some of my landscape "sketches" that I've been playing with recently, in keeping with the Forum First Quarter Challenge.

Sometimes I find it can be frustrating trying to work fast and loose with textiles because it can be hard to get immediacy and spontaneity if you have to stop to make a piece of prefelt in the right colour, spin a piece of yarn or dye a piece of fabric, so I decided to do some work using an embellisher machine because that does give some immediacy to the process. I started by taking an old piece of handmade felt and laying down some random (repurposed) fabrics. I really didn't like what I had created but using my trusty view finder I found a small section that I did like, and it seemed to work both ways up which was interesting!:

I decided to have another go and this time this piece is showing more potential, albeit an experiment. I didn't have quite the right mustard colour but used what I had (an old jumper that had seen it's way into the fabric box) and felted that in, it worked well! This is the work in progress:

I like it as it is but it's a bit plain so I think it is a candidate for some experimental painting and stitching :) I rediscovered some paint experiments I did a while back and want to have another go. It's only a small piece approx 28cm x 23cm so it might be worth making a bigger one as well to have more room to work.

I also really like the back of this one. It's got a freedom about it and I especially like the way the embellisher pushes up loops of fabric. I do quite often like the back of pieces of felt!

I also chopped up some scraps of felt and made some wet felted samples. These came out a bit 'cartoony' as I outlined in black and white thread (forgot the lines would wiggle when felted, doh!) and kept the colours flat. Except for the square of fabric in the sky which I think was the most successful part of the pictures. When I felted these 4 they were very close together and a few bits attached so they were partially joined together. I snipped them apart but that's another discovery that could be quite interesting to attempt intentionally. It's all learning time :)

Another thing I've been playing with is my drum carder to mix up colours to make some interesting, very thin, prefelts to cut up and use in further works. So far I've felted two batts and I really like the results. It's very fragile felt because the fibres are running the same way in many places where I just sort of pushed and pulled it about to lay it out, and I have only lightly fulled it. It's very thin and has holes in places and is thicker in other places. It will either make interesting prefelt for inlays or will fall apart when I use it :)

I've carded two more, 1 using pinks and 1 using some more blues:

It got me thinking that I'd like to make a really big piece with this method and keep it as a big finished piece - maybe a landscape, but maybe just an abstract colourful thing depending on how it goes. It would also need some way of mounting as it's quite fragile. I'll do another post about that at some point as things progress. I have reconfigured my work space so I can make a 1 metre square piece. Wish me luck, it's got disaster written all over it! :)