rosiepink

Felting in the Fauvism style "View From a Window"

'View From a Window'      

Lyn

The current challenge on The Felting and Fiber Forum is to make a felt picture in the style of the Fauvist period - Fauvist paintings have a simplified drawing and an exaggerated use of colour. 

I searched the internet for art from the Fauvist period and found that I quite liked the painting below by Henri Matisse, 'The Open Window', so the felt picture above is my take on it.

My felt picture was made mostly by wet-felting using dyed merino wool, and the glass vase is a little piece of open weave fabric felted in. The flowers, curtain track and opening-window frames are needle-felted in using yarn, then free motion stitching defined the curtains and interior window frame.  The picture measures 50 x 36cm (20" x 14") and I stitched it to a pale blue stretched canvas.

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Recently Annie and I found a couple of nifty things in 'Ikea' to help with our felting.  We've been using a flat grater to grate hard bars of olive oil soap to make our soap solution, but it's not easy and we often grate our finger nails along with the soap!  We bought a rotary grater for just £4 ($5)...

... and it's brilliant.  It will even grate those annoying little chunks that fall away and are impossible to grate on a flat grater.  We used the fine rotary wheel and found that the resulting soap 'powder' was quick and easy to make and very easy to dissolve in water.  

We also found this airer for £5 ($6.25) - it folds flat for easy storage. The rails are 79cm (31") long and ideal for drying wet-felted pictures. We put cross-stitch plastic canvas on the rails to fully support wet felt...

...and it's useful for drip-drying felt-making equipment!

We find it hard to look at anything without wondering if it could be useful in our craft rooms!

 

 

A belated Happy New Year and some felty fluffy things!

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!

 

I'm having fun playing and making samples. Hope you are enjoying a creative new year too :)

Merry Christmas! :)

Merry Christmas from me and mum!

Annie

I haven't thought much about Christmas this year because the last few months have been largely taken up with replastering, rewiring and generally fixing up my house a bit. I've waited 11 years to do it but we're finally getting there and all the woodchip wallpaper has gone! Yay!

That has all taken up an awful lot of time but I wanted to make at least one Christmas decoration, and so I made a little picture of a pudding to hang up.

I didn't know that was what I was going to make, I had no plan but started by stitching a little Christmas pudding to see where it took me. I had thought it might look cute if I stitched lots of them and made some musical notes out of them but I only got as far as making one before I changed my mind! I cut it out of the calico it was stitched onto and restitched it on to a piece of experimental handmade felt that I made a few weeks ago using various bits of scrap fabric that I wanted to try out (once I made it I thought I would use it for a few mini landscapes but again I changed my mind!).

I hand stitched a little badge saying "Figgy Pudding" and tacked it on. It looked a little bare at this point so I couched a bright yellow thread around the outline of the pudding and added some white french knots to liven it up and look a bit like snow. Lastly I added some beaded trim around the edge.

The little frame is actually a Christmas sign that I bought. It says "Naughty or Nice?" which is now behind the pudding, but I only bought it for the frame :) As I was working I tacked a black outline around the square that I would then cut out to fit into the frame to make sure I was working within the size of the frame.

Here are a couple of pics of the experimental bit of felt I made before I stitched on the pudding and cut out the square.  I tried a few things out like cutting little flowers out of fabric and felting them in and felting in various new yarns and other bits n bobs like crochet chains. I also felted in some bright pink plastic tutu netting under some open weave fabric which gave quite a nice effect. Such fun!  It's only a small piece but I tried out lots of things.

The decorating schedule has meant we've been on a furniture merry go round for a couple of months, always having to get things from one room to another to make room for the next thing. Next time I think that decorating four rooms plus the hallway and landing all in one go is a good idea, please do correct me! It's a terrible idea! Anyway, on one day there was a sofa and various other things blocking the doorway to my craft room and all I had to fiddle with was some copper wire that the electricians had discarded so I made the outline of this little tree. I later then filled it in with finer copper wire and some colourful beads.  I think it's rather cute at only a few centimetres tall.

We hope you found some crafty time in the run up, and wish you all a lovely Christmas. x

 

festive felt wrap for an amaryllis pot

Lyn

Back in the summer I bought two strings of led silver wire lights and I used one set inside a decorative glass bottle.  I put the other set by for Christmas with a vague idea of incorporating it into a piece of felt.

Well, just over a week before Christmas and the set of lights was still untouched on my projects pile.  So I looked around for inspiration and spotted the bright red amaryllis we have indoors for Christmas...well actually we have a pot with several very tall green shoots in it but it will be lovely when it blooms.

I thought about simply wrapping the string of lights around the pot but it's a dull colour, so I made a piece of felt that the pot could sit in.  I used merino wool in three shades of green: olive green at the bottom, pistachio green in the middle and spring green at the top - finished height is 8" (20cm) - and this is the shape I cut to wrap around the pot.

I stitched the wire of lights to the felt using "Bottomline" pale grey thread - it's a very fine thread so stitches aren't noticeable unless you look closely.

I closed the back with cross stitches using three strands of embroidery thread.  In the photo below you can see that the battery pack sits at the back of the pot on the shelf.

The wrap looks good too without the lights.

And here's another view of the lights - I just turned the pot slightly to view from a different angle.

 

Christmas bunting - quick and no sewing

Lyn    

I popped down to my local fabric shop to buy one thing and as usual came out with a bagful of goodies!  I also came away with the above idea for quick and easy Christmas bunting - no sewing!  It's simply triangles of Christmas fabric cut out with pinking shears then pegged to some string with mini-pegs usually used for card making.  You could use handmade felt or thick wrapping paper instead of fabric and ribbon instead of string.

A partridge in a pear tree

Lyn

For my Christmas card this year, I wanted an image of a partridge sitting in a pear tree with the first line of the song written along a branch, so I sketched out my idea several times until I was happy with the composition.

I decided to applique silk onto calico - the silk frays like mad but  I like the effect. The eagle-eyed amongst you will spot a stray tuft of thread on the leaf, top right, that I didn't notice when I took the photo!

I used iron-on fusible webbing to make a mini quilt by sandwiching some thin cotton batting between two layers of calico, then I stitched an A4 sized frame to work within.  The tree branches and writing were stitched before the brown partridge shape was stitched into place. 

I added a white piece of silk for his face, then I worked on the eyes next because unless I could get them right the whole piece wouldn't work.  I used black thread to machine stitch the pupils and a polyneon orange for the irises.  I added the glint by hand but I had to use pliers to pull the needle back and forth as the machine stitching through the quilt was really solid.

After the eyes it was plain sailing and I added all the other silk shapes as I'd planned on my sketch.

I cropped the photograph then added a red border - I used a free photo editing programme "PicMonkey".

The wording inside the card will be:

"On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me

A partridge in a pear tree.

Very nice ... but I'd rather have a box of chocolates!"

I bet you couldn't read the first two lines without singing them in your head!

Felt and Stitch - Autumn Leaves Bowl

Lyn

Nothing symbolises autumn more than the stunning colours of the leaves on the trees, so those colours were the starting point of my plan for an ornamental bowl.

I chose five different leaves for my project and made a paper template for my design - well, actually I made several templates as I just kept going with the scissors and sellotape until I was happy with the shape.  Then I knew what size to make my piece of felt.  This is the dry layout and I was surprised at how much the little bit of green showed after felting:

I added a lot of coloured bits of dyed scrim and other open weave materials, nepps, silk noil and scraps of leftover felt, to give the impression of the spotty appearance that leaves often develop just before falling from the tree. The underside of the felt is also patterned.

The felt was fulled to the max so that it had a 'stiffness' even before I added the machine stitching.

The photo below shows the stitching in the centre of the bowl - the circles gave a good rigidity to the base and it was an easy stitch to fit around the leaf stems!

The bowl stands 3" tall and is 12" at its widest (8x30cm).

Before I go, I want to show off my bargain buy from Ikea's clearance bin.  It was labelled as a chopping board - it's a decent size at 17" x 14.5" (43x37cm) - and the ridged underside is just right for the last hard fulling on things like cords and vessels.

 

 

 

Felt flowers for mum's birthday card

Annie

It was mum's birthday recently and I like to make cards when I can although invariably I run out of time and am late!  I often start by having a rummage through the odds and ends of scraps and samples in my sewing room looking for something to use as a start.  This time I dug out a piece of flat felt from the end of last year that I had actually made for Christmassy things but didn't use it, and then in the spring had appliqued a few flowers on it and then abandoned it.  So this time I gave it it's third outing and ended up with a nice flowery card for mum's birthday, which was at the end of July but she received it a few weeks late!  Well I couldn't have delivered on time else dad might have thought it was favouritism :)   It's funny how with fresh eyes something once discarded can later be made into something new.

The basic process involved machine appliqueing small pieces of handmade felt onto a felted background to form the flowers, then adding lots of hand stitching around the edges and on the background.  Finally I cut round the design, edged it with a free motion zig zag and stuck it to a folded piece of A4 card.

Here's a pic of the back of the stitching at about half way through. As always, I liked the look of the back too!

A Memory in Felt and Stitch

Lyn

Cowes week is the oldest and largest annual sailing regatta in the world and today marks the end of the 2016 event hosted by the Isle of Wight.

Back in 2010 we took our young grand-daughter to Lepe Beach where there is a great view of the Solent and the Isle of Wight. The beach is mainly stones and shells but if you look hard enough there is just enough sand to make a few castles.  

Path to Lepe Beach on the Solent with the Isle of Wight in the distance

As the tide was still coming in, we managed to paddle out quite a long way and we saw a small yacht come aground on the sand bar close to where we stood.  The captain's enthusiasm must have exceeded his ability! The sails flapped wildly and there was much shouting and confusion.

But mostly we just stood there in the sea, hand in hand, watching the yachts go by.  It's that precious memory that I wanted to catch in felt and stitch.

Memories can be sharp on the good bits and fuzzy on the rest, so I decided to only colour the figures to highlight the important part of my memory.

I made a piece of bright white merino felt then I started to stitch hand-made felt on for the clothing, but it looked too solid.  Out came the stitch-ripper.

I rummaged around in my scraps box and found some frilly edges (when I make felt for cutting shapes from, I don't bother to neaten the edges so they end up frilly).

I stitched pieces of frilly felt onto the figures and found that the effect is dreamy - perfect for my memory picture.

Busy Buzzy Bees - Finished or Work In Progress?

Busy Buzzy Bees

Annie

A few weeks ago I went out in the garden with a cup of tea with a plan to clear the patio and spruce it up a bit. But then I stopped and sat there with my cup of tea for a while and decided that it was actually really pretty in all it's weedy overgrown glory, and thought I'd leave it alone - especially as the chives were attracting lots of bees! and as they say, weeds are only plants in the wrong place.  As my garden has been neglected for a while there are lots of weeds - and lots of them are really pretty.  In fact my vegetable bed has completely given over to nature and is now a mini-meadow!

I thought the bees and chives and daisies would be a nice idea for a felted picture so I took a few photos.

Then I laid out a background, added some extra bits, took a few bits away, and added some paint, and added some stitching...... 

  

Laying Out (adding prefelts on top of wetted down fibres)

  

After felting

Some paint applied

Some stitching added

Now my dilemma is - is it finished or do I keep on fiddling with it? One of the hardest things is knowing when something is finished, when to stop. Finish too early and it feels like (and can look like) you held back. Finish too late and you can overwork it.

I do like to play and push it to see what happens. Which sometimes results in going too far! But sometimes results in a great piece and lots of things learned.

I think in this case I might leave it, and think again later after a period of it hanging on the wall. I could add some green stitching to the stems and some white fabric or some paint to fill in the bees wings.....

But most importantly it doesn't really matter as long as you enjoy the process! :)

Just trying out a smaller crop - sometimes the cropping can make or break a picture too!