rosiepink

nuno felt art - the bird and his breakfast

Lyn

The second quarter challenge on 'The Felting and Fiber Forum' is to use nuno felt as a surface decoration.  "The Bird and his Breakfast" is my entry to this challenge.  Please hop on over to the The Felting and Fiber Forum Blog to read more!

Handmade Felt, Metalwork, Printmaking, Dressmaking aaaand a New Tutorial! :)

Work In Progress - Test layout

Annie

While tidying up my sewing room (yet again!) I rediscovered this lovely sample piece of fabric I bought in Cheltenham last year (by rosablue, Cheltenham):

I thought it would be nice to use it as inspiration for a piece of felt because I love the design and it's simplicity and I do enjoy working with leaves and flowers. I made a piece of felt a few weeks ago that I was really unhappy with but looking at it again thought I might be able to cut it up and use it in a new piece.

First I cut out a few sections that I did like that I wanted to keep as they might be useful for other things such as small pictures or greeting cards (top and bottom right in picture). A few of the snippets at the top look a bit like mini beachscapes and the others are just interesting or have a useful technique to remember like the flower shapes made out of yarn. I cut the rest into leaf shapes to lay out in my new piece of felt.

Before I make my leaves picture I thought I would make a sample sheet of different techniques to see how different things worked and looked. I had tried using the embellisher to attach a leaf to some other felt but it obliterated all the detail. Sometimes that's a great effect but for this picture I wanted something else. So I thought a sample sheet would be useful. I laid out a small square (finished size is approx a 10in/25cm square) and I tried several different ideas on it.

I tried different background fabrics to add texture and I also tried lots of layering and outlining ideas. I tried layering the felt pieces, layering two layers of fabric then the felt on top, silk outlines, yarn outlines, chopped up felt "confetti" pieces, fabric then fibre then a piece of felt, cutting a hole in the fabric - all sorts of combinations!

This is as far as I have got but I'll attempt to finish it soon. It's currently brewing in my head :)

I've done a few other things recently too. I have actually finished 3 (three!) projects. I made an artisan wrap apron and am really pleased with how it turned out. I think it's only the second item of clothing I've made and now I can't wait to make more things! It's a bit crumpled and messy in the photo because I've worn it a lot for printmaking etc.

I printed 1.5 metres of fabric (from an old bed sheet) with the clouds design I mentioned in my previous post and made a pillow case for an oversized pillow from it. I've had 4 of these pillows for years with no covers to use so they have been in vacuum bags just waiting for me to make the covers.  One down, three to go!

I also went on a metalwork workshop (at West Dean - I've wanted to go for years and finally did it!) and made a big sunflower out of copper and aluminium (it is approx 22in/55cm across and the stem is just over 7 foot/215cm tall!). I learnt how to cut, heat and shape, hammer and texture, rivet, use a pillar drill etc. It was great fun! :) The marker pen markings need cleaning off, but here it is.  I love it!

Lyn

We've also been busy creating a new eBook.  We decided to make the abstract felt and stitch technique from this blog post into an eBook to sit alongside our others.  This easy technique enables the reader to make many variations and unique pieces of art with their own design and colour palette.  We used a simple fish design but you could use any simple shape e.g. a stylised sailboat, vase or leaf.

There are step-by-step explanations and photos to guide the reader through the design, felting and stitching processes to make a piece of felt art, mounted on a stretched canvas, and ready to hang on a wall.

If you'd like to, you can read more about it here:)

 

 

 

It's not what I planned....Creative Happy Accidents! :)

 

Annie

I love how when you play and experiment without overthinking what you are creating that you can get some lovely unexpected results....but I also find this happens to me a lot when I am actually really trying :) and it goes "wrong", or when I am simply clearing out or rearranging my workspace I get inspired in unexpected ways.

The "rain" on the felt above happened by accident when my desk was too messy (as always I had gotten to the point where everything was out!) and I was too lazy to get paper towels to clean up as I worked. I wiped the wooden skewer clean that I was using to paint with on my brayer roller then realised that was a bad idea so I cleaned the brayer on a piece of felt in the pile. Immediately I thought - "ooh rain over a stormy sea!" Brilliant! I wonder whether if I had actually been trying to create rain whether I would have thought to put paint on a roller from a skewer?

I have recently begun a fabric printing evening class - hence the renewed interest in playing with paints!  It's a basic introduction to making homemade stamps out of anything you can think of (more hoarding coming up!), lino cutting, silk screen with stencils and learning how to make repeating patterns etc. It's a lovely low-tech course using pen and paper rather than the computer. On my first session I picked up some pipe insulation to print circles (I love working with simple circles - there is something very pleasing to my eye about the circle) and I applied the fabric paint and started stamping out circles only to discover I hadn't cleaned the paint roller properly and there was still traces of yellow on it which mixed with the blue. The effect was lovely and one I will use again :)

For homework I carved a stamp from lino - the repeating cloud pattern below took me about 5 attempts to get right, but eventually it happened.  I showed unusual persistence with this! However, I forgot about lining up the marks in the sky around the clouds and just gouged it out randomly. I was disappointed to start with then realised that I actually prefer that it is a bit mismatched as it shows the handmade-ness of it. I'd like to use this design (or something like it) to make a bedside lampshade one day, or more likely a pillow case.

I did some more experimenting with circles, this time on to some handmade felt. I found the scrim topping really helped the paint to sit more clearly rather than straight on to fibres. However, I thought I had mixed opaque paints but I had used the translucent binders in the mix, and also I'd not let it dry in between and the colours showed through and mixed. To great effect! Not what I had intended but nice all the same.

A great side effect of all the printing is that I found if I leave an open sketchbook next to me I can clean my tools off on to the pages (as well as any felt or fabric laying around) and I get some unplanned freely created backgrounds in my sketchbook which is always good to not have to start with a blank white page when you want to sketch something.

I discovered how effective randomness with a brayer roller can be when I was sketching at evening class using twigs etc as "pens" to encourage freedom of mark-making. My piece of paper ended up like this...

...with lots of really effective pieces in it. The "bumps" that fade as they go up the page are from paint blobs on the brayer and the the little square of heart shapes is from the end of my twig where it didn't sharpen properly.

Back at home clearing out my craft space (again! it gets soooo messy!) I found a pile of colour catcher sheets (the ones you put in the washing machine) in all lovely colours that I'd been saving. For something. I've no idea what. Time to be ruthless I thought... until I picked up the stack and bent them in half - could they be made into a little textiles sketchbook?!

Lastly (for now!), I'm always looking for new ways to make effective edges on small pieces of felt and I found this little sample in my pile. The piece of fabric must have been the edge of an old scarf or something and the frayed edge had stayed free of the wool fibres and made an interesting edge. Something to try to repeat in the future maybe on a small flowers picture or a wild landscape.

The trouble is that the more you play with stuff the more that this happens which leads to more ideas! I'm sure we've all got plenty of examples. If only spare time was like creativity and the more you used the more you got!

 

 

 

Nuno Felt & Stitch Valentine Birds

Lyn

'Surface Design' is this quarter's challenge on The Felting and Fiber Forum, so I chose to make felt topped with fabric (nuno felt) and stitching, and as it's February it had to have a Valentine influence!

Lovebirds are traditionally used to depict 'billing and cooing' but I favoured cockatoos for my design, and as I can't draw a cockatoo without help, my thanks go to Darkonator who's posted an easy to follow tutorial.

To make my design I drew two cockatoos - the female facing left with her head tilted upwards and the male facing right with his head tilting down and I drew his crest larger than hers. I cut both birds out then placed them, at the angles I wanted, onto a new sheet of paper then I added the branches. 

Cockatoos aren't that colourful really, but hey, I had a gorgeous piece of loose-weave fabric that was begging to be made into nuno felt, so I started with four fine layers of merino wool fibres - the top layer was variegated ...

...then I covered the wool fibres with the fabric.  Shown below is the finished nuno felt and a close up to show the lovely texture.

I traced the outline of the bird design, cut it out, then tacked it onto the nuno felt.  I had to use more than one piece of tracing paper so the more opaque areas are where two sheets have overlapped and the shiny bits are sticky tape that I used to secure the ends of the tacking thread.  The design is approx 12" tall and 11" wide.

I stitched around the outline then removed the tracing paper.  It was then easy to complete the cockatoos within the outline. When the stitching was complete, I cut the birds out then stitched them to very thick artist's paper. 

Now I'm going to have some fun trawling the local charity shops in search of the perfect frame ... and with luck I'll find some more fabric for my stash! 

 

 

Felt & Stitch Art

Shoal of Fish

Lyn

I wanted to make a felt picture that would be 'bright, sharp and minimal', and after much doodling and pencil-chewing I developed my idea.

I made a lot of pre-felt, in many different colours, to cut into shapes to experiment with, then when I was happy with the felted pattern I added some free motion machine stitching to really sharpen it up, but I still wanted 'Shoal of Fish' to stand out some more so I cut it away from its background and stitched it to a stretched canvas that I'd painted white.

Shown below is a cropped photo from another piece that I made at the same time and it made me think that with the right angles and colours this would be a great way to create an abstract landscape picture.

I'm enjoying this way of felting - I think it has potential for more experimentation! 

 

Happy Christmas!

Thank you to everyone who has read our blog and supported us again this year.  We really enjoy receiving so many lovely emails and comments and appreciate all of the wonderful feedback.

We hope everyone is having a lovely holiday.  Here's to many more felty, fibrey and fluffy colourful adventures in the New Year, Annie & Lyn xx

It's not looking much like Christmas....but it is colourful and flowery and felty!

Annie

I know I should probably be all Christmassey with my craft projects by now but I'm just not feeling it yet so instead I made a picture of a jug of colourful flowers. I like to think of it as getting ahead on spring projects :)

This picture could be considered finished as it is but you know me I have a few ways I'd like to work on it further.

I started by putting down some layers of fibres but also some scrim layers because I think I might like to play with it on the embellisher to see if anything interesting happens. I'm thinking the cotton of the scrim could do fun things and I'd also possibly like to knock back some of the colour around the flowers with something white - maybe white fibres, maybe some white fabric. Not sure yet. There's a good chance I'll ruin it as I do like to push things til they break, but at least I have a photo of it for reference :)

Once I had the base layers down I started drawing and colouring in the picture with scraps of fabrics, silk threads and lots of shapes cut from pre-felts.

I kept playing with it all and rearranging the pieces until I was happy with it then felted it. So as not to disturb the design too much and limit the crinkling of the fabrics I felted it flat with no rolling on this occasion. I love texture in feltmaking but for this picture I wanted to keep it quite flat and more painterly. For now anyway! Who knows what I might do to it later :)

Here are a couple of pictures at an angle so you can see it is quite flat despite all the tons of odds n ends I used to build up the picture. I like the outline around some of the details made from dark silk threads I pulled from some fraying fabric, and I like the bright colours showing through the "table cloth" at the bottom.

I do like it as it is, but I made it to play with and experiment on so I mustn't be precious about it. I think it will get a stint on the wall while I think about it more, and also I feel like I might try on my Christmas hat and attempt at least one small festive project before I come back to the flowers. Trouble is choosing something and getting on with it as time is really rather short now!

A robin, a flamingo and a surprise painting

 

Annie

 

I accidentally made this little scene the other day of a robin perched on some dogwood and rudbekia seedheads.  I'd started out with something else in mind entirely, but I am easily distracted!

What happened is that I've been mulling over my various photos, samples, experiments and unfinished pieces to decide what things to do next, from a long and growing list!

I had decided to revisit the work I had started doing after visiting Arish Mell and I had the lime and turquoise fabric in my hand.  Then I randomly remembered that I'd seen some bright red dogwood at an open garden in the week and thought the colours would work well together, and off I went on a tangent!  

 

Here is an early stage of the stitching to show how it started with the dogwood.

 

 

These are the rudbekia seed heads I used to stitch from:

 

 

I like to add a fun detail on this sort of picture so it's not too grown up and as the bees are all asleep at the moment I went for a little robin :)  I was going to put some bright pink cyclamen on there but they didn't really go.  Sometimes it's a pain to be so unfocused but sometimes it's a good thing - I enjoyed doing some machine stitching and I also re-discovered how much I like working with matt threads as well as shiny ones.  A lot of mine are shiny but I think I might be adding a few things to my Christmas list this year!

 

I like the edge of the felt on this one.  Quite often I like a square edge but this time I cut it not long after I'd begun working it and ended up with a sort of torn paper look.

 

 

While I've been sorting out I've dug out all sorts of bits and bobs, along the way this one made me laugh! : 

 

 

Looking at it I'm not sure where I was heading (!) with that one but I kind of like it!  I found this little sketch that I did at the time

 

 

I can't remember what it was all about, maybe his head was going to appear round the other side?  I do like the style of the hand stitching on this and enjoy doing this type of work.  I'll see what else I can dig out.  I still haven't found a good way to organise all my odds and ends to make them more useful but I feel a bit torn - one side of me wants everything all organised and easy to flip through and the other side of me wants it all in piles so I can rummage and let accidental clashes of ideas happen! 

 

I did find a few useful things that might feed into my coastal pieces, here is a selection:

 

 

and I started to think about what I might do composition wise.  I quite like the idea of the abstract squares to give a feeling of the coast, and not so much the sketch that looks more like the photo.  

 

 

I did make two little pieces to try it out - one with a mosaic method and one with a collage method and I quite like them:

 

 

 

 

I'm wondering whether a grid of squares might work well, rather than one bigger picture.  Will work on it.

 

I have also been spinning some more experimental yarns.  Here is one of them:

 

 

I have no plan for these, I just enjoy the spinning really.  Although they will probably end up in some felt! I do quite like the effect of felting with wild overspun yarn and needlefelting scrim on top. Like this sample that I made a while ago:

 

 

 

On my long list of things to do is to make a giant panel in this style but that will need a little planning.  I think that's a job for a nice cosy winter's evening to sort through the millions of inspiration photos I've taken recently to pick a few to work from.

 

Before I go, I just want to share this last pic - I made a "Stay Wet" palette for my acrylic paints (baking paper layered on top of wet kitchen paper in a tupperware box), and when I went back to it after a week it had all mixed itself up and created a lovely scene!  Annoyingly much better than anything I could have painted!  

 

From Pencil Sketch to Felted Christmas Diorama

Lyn

This year's Christmas card image is of a simple diorama and I'm pleased with the way it turned out, but it's very different from my original idea!

I wanted to make another snowmen diorama and my idea, inspired by an old memory, was to have two snowmen decorating a tree with a string of multi-coloured LED mini lights. Back in the day it was always Dad's job to put the lights on the tree - after everyone had helped to untangle the 50 feet of wire and bulbs - and he'd have to fiddle with every bulb to find the one that had broken and was causing the whole string to fail.

Whilst smiling at the memory I made a quick sketch of Mr Snowman putting the lights on the snow-tree and Mrs Snowman untangling the end of the string for him.

I couldn't wait to start so I bought some spotty fabric for the background to give the impression of snow in a dark sky, then I made a piece of white felt to form into a cone for the snow-tree and finally I made 6 snowballs - they're still drying on the rack in the photo and the biggest one is 2.5" diameter. (My first snowman diorama was made in 2015 - see this post for some 'how-to' tips) 

The snowmen were easy to make from the snowballs. I made 2 carrot noses from orange merino wool and cut 2 party hats using felt from my scrap-box. The arms were formed with black florist's wire.

The cone-of-snow tree was easy to make too ... but it just didn't look right.  I carried on and stitched the lights to it but it still didn't look right. So I removed it.

I chewed the end of my pencil for a bit then I thought of finding a twig that might look like a tree.  I painted the upper 'branches' with white acrylic paint and made a heavy base for it from modelling clay.

It was tricky getting the wire string of LED lights into place - it comes packed as a coil and wants to stay that way - but eventually the scene was complete and photographed.

Sometimes I hate cameras.  The little scene with its multi-coloured mini-lights was so pretty but try as I might I could not get a photograph of it.  The colours in the lights almost disappeared and where they touched the white merino wool 'snow' it just looked like a huge white flare. So I removed them.

At this point my plan was in tatters so I chewed the end of my pencil again and my mind wandered back in time again to when our front room would have paper chains hanging everywhere.  Then I remembered that a young Annie had once made yards and yards of miniature paper chain ... Ta-Dah! 

I cut strips of coloured paper 1/4" by 2" to make the chain and I used a glue stick to secure the ends of the strips together.

The finished paper chain draped around the tree beautifully and it was easy to place into the snowmen's hands.

But photographs revealed that the background wasn't working.  You know how sometimes a stripey fabric can make your eyes spin?  Well, the spotty fabric gave the same effect in a photograph! So I removed it.

Luckily I have a very large coloured board that looked just right as a background and the lovely blue sky was the perfect backdrop for white text - here is the finished image I sent to the print-shop.

 

Abstract Felting and Stitching - Suprematist Style

Lyn

This quarter's challenge from Zed on the Felting and Fiber Forum is to make a piece of felt in the style of 'Suprematism'.

No, I hadn't heard of that style of art before either!  So I 'googled' and 'youtubed' but I still don't really understand it. 

However, it seems to be all about placing simple shapes of various colours and textures into a pleasing arrangement!

For my texture and colour I used some of Annie's hand-dyed scrim - I made 5 pieces of nuno felt by placing dyed scrim onto similar coloured merino wool from which to cut the shapes I wanted.

I chose to make the background from white merino wool so that it looked like an artist's stretched canvas.  I carefully placed the shapes, then even more carefully I began the felting process from the reverse side - I hoped that this would preserve the arrangement.

I only rubbed the wool fibres so the felt is still 'soft' but it's firm enough for a piece of art, and the finished size is approx 40 x 26cm (16"x 10").

Some of the shapes went a little wonky - such is the nature of felting - but after a bit of black stitching I'm happy with the result!