rosiepink

Merry Christmas!

Hello everyone.  Merry Christmas! 

It's been such a busy year! Not nearly enough time to play and make felt and sew, so we'll definitely have to sort that out over the next year!  Just wanted to pop by and wish everyone a Merry Christmas - hope you all have a lovely time.

I decided today that anything Christmas related that wasn't done by now would just have to wait. Its my first day off from the office for the holiday today and I decided to indulge myself and sew!

I wanted a quick and simple project that I could finish in a couple of hours (otherwise things have a habit of remaining in the unfinished pile! So I dug around in my felt leftovers box and found an interesting little piece of felt in need of some love!  So in a couple of hours of blissful, non-planned out stitching it became this picture of a wintery sunshiney hillside...

...from this little scrap of felt (measuring 20cm x 15cm):

It just needs a bit of backing card, and maybe a recycled frame.  It was cut from a big piece of felt when I was experimenting with layering sections of felt a while back.  That project never got finished but it has opened up a new world of smaller projects!

Mum has been busy with nuno felting and has made this really pretty cushion front.  Much of the stronger colour comes from fine fabric (recycled chiffon and silk scarves!) felted into the merino wool.  Machine stitching adds lovely detail to the petals and the flower centre:

One last thing before I go, I made a new discovery today.  Not sure if it works or not, but is definitely worthy of further exploration!   While photographing the winter hillside picture I stumbled upon this effect by accidentally turning my spotlight light on while it was under the felt...I'm hoping it looks like twinkly fairly lights (either that or a forest fire.  Hopefully fairy lights win?!):

Merry Christmas!!

(here is a beautiful Christmas card handmade by my mum, just for you x)

Experimental Stitched Felt & Fabric Collage - Work in Progress

While rummaging through some of my stash boxes at the weekend I came across a lonely, unfinished and neglected felt picture that I felted about 2 years ago and then abandoned because I thought at the time it hadn’t gone “right” and was nothing like what I’d had in mind.  But of course there is no right and wrong, and, with fresh eyes I decided I would begin to rescue and recycle this piece, instead of doing what I had planned to do that day.  I’m sooo easily distracted!

It’s a harbour scene inspired by so many lovely coastal holidays.  I'm using it now simply as base for a completely different take on the original idea - instead of just felt and stitch I am completing it using lots of messy stitched fabric collage to give it loads of texture and a whole new colour palette to really bring it to life.  You can see in the pictures the first few bits of fabric being applied.  It could be a complete disaster!  But I like to experiment so we will see :-)

It’s quite a big piece at 90cm x 55cm so will take quite a while to finish!  There’s lots of tearing & cutting and miles & miles of stitching to do.  There will be both hand and machine stitching and maybe even a bit of acrylic paint I reckon.  Not sure yet.  Whatever takes my mood at the time!

I’ve collected together some of my photos of harbour scenes from holidays in Devon and Cornwall for inspiration so it will be a mixture of elements from those photos and a lot from imagination.  There will almost certainly be bunting!  More pictures to come as it progresses...

Felted Flotsam Picture

Hello

Just wanted to share this simple but effective felt picture of flotsam that mum made recently.  She made a fine piece of flat felt from blues and turquoises with scattered torn scrim, nepps, silk noils and silk tops.  For an experiment she used CMC paste (after felting) to give it a 3D effect of gentle waves.  This photo is taken at angle, so hopefully you can see the shape of the waves. 

Here it is in its flat form before the CMC paste was applied. 

The finished size is 80 cm x 40 cm.  It seems the list of things you can make and do with handmade felt is endless - if only there were more hours in the day to play!

Many happy hours of machine and hand stitching later......

.....a piece of flowery textile art is finished.  Ta dah!  Fluffy felty stitchy flowers. Done :-)

Really enjoyed making this picture - lots of texture was created while machine stitching into the handmade felt and then adding small details by hand lifted the colours in places, especially a little spray of white flowers here and there and lots of colorful french knots.  Trouble is that its hard to know when to stop!

Making Handspun Yarns for Creating Texture in Handmade Felt

I had a bit of a play yesterday - look what I made!  OK, so I'm no expert and its a bit rough and bumpy, but luckily that's exactly what we want for adding texture to our handmade felt artwork!

Handspun yarn is great for adding texture in handmade felt, and for ages we've wanted to be able to make our own so that we can have just a couple of metres of each of lots of colours that are custom to our projects.   I've been putting off having a go despite us buying some equipment a couple of years ago as I didn't really know what I was doing and had little time to figure it out.  However, yesterday I got brave, dusted off the carder and the wheel, watched a couple of great "how to" videos and just had a go!  I decided not to worry about being too technical and to just see what happened - especially as this yarn doesn't need to be "good" yarn - I quickly realised that I could easily create an overtwisted, knobbly, and very imperfect yarn!  Ta dah!  Perfect for felt making!

Here are my "ingredients" ready to be yummed up by the carding machine....

Before carding my batt I watched a handful of short videos on creating art batts, and these are the ones I liked best:

How to card an art batt on a drum carder from NeauveauFibreArts shows a technique for layering everything up before feeding it in to the carder which seems to work nicely!

Drum Carding Art Batts by AtomicBlue

Carding a Jazzy Batt by JazzTurtleCreations

After watching the last two I realised there are so many toys that I want NEED!  Especially a carder with coarser cloth and wider teeth to cope with more fibre types.  Will have to save up :-)

So, here are the fibres starting to get pulled on to the big drum - yum!

And here is my finished batt after about 10 minutes of playing with the carder and putting random colours and fibres through!

Among other things, it is made of merino, wensleydale, silks and some lovely sparkly angelina fibres although I couldn't persuade the camera to pick up the glittery detail unfortunately!

I'm a bit impatient, always looking for instant gratification, so I only watched one or two videos on how to actually spin.  I had one lesson a couple of years so thought that would do!

How to Spin Roving into Yarn from NeauveauFibreArts was the one I watched and it was a good intro.  Again, I realised I now want NEED a wheel with a bigger orifice!  I want to make thick, bobbly, highly textured yarns!

I'm sure there is a proper way to prepare a batt for spinning but I just sort of tore mine apart and had a go!  The batt didn't make much, only about 30g!  But its a start.  I need to practice making a hank, but here it is in all its imperfect glory!

Anyway, I'm glad I got over my "fear" of having a go and now I can't wait to make loads! 

Oh, and I finally made some progress on stitching the flowers pic....

...the finished thing will be with you shortly!

 

More Wet Felt Making and lots of odds n ends!

Forgot to say last time that we are delighted to be the current 'Featured Artist' at Wingham Wool Work !  Go take a peek! 

I made some progress on my Spring Flowers picture by finally getting around to felting it - now I just need to wait for it to dry properly before I attack it with needles and threads and make it come alive!

Mum has also been busy and has created this lovely picture of a beached boat:

She was inspired after looking through some of our old holiday photos.  The boat hull and fence-post shapes were cut from handmade, grey pre-felt then placed on top of dry fibres that had been laid out for the background of beach, sea and sky before wet felting together. Machine stitching picked out the planking on the boat and made the wire on the fence-posts.

It is 65cm x 31cm.

As you know, mum and I have recently launched our eBook 'Creating Felt Artwork' and we’ve been so pleased to receive such a lot of positive feedback and sales already.  It has been really popular so far and we are really glad it is being well received after so much hard (but fun) work!

Some of you may already be familiar with a delightful blog Clasheen.  Nicola and Chrissie have also written a book called ‘From Felt to Friendship’ ...a glimpse into the working lives and inspiration of two totally dedicated felters...  Looks fabulous!

 

 

New felt picture in progress - Some handmade felt springy woolly felty flowers :)

Hello! On Saturday I stole back some time for myself and indulged in some creativity - Heaven!  I haven't been able to have much time for feltmaking recently so I really went to town given the opportunity - out came all the boxes of fibre goodness and fluff, and after lots of rummaging around in my stash of wool and wonders (think "child in sweet shop!") my workspace looked like a big colourful explosion in a fibre factory! After sifting through my inspiration box (and playing with the wool for a while, and after a lot of indecisiveness, and revisiting some of my scribbled and sketched ideas), I decided to lay out a picture of some bright felty spring flowers.  I used merino wool, prefelts, yarn and hand dyed scrim.

As I haven't made anything in a while, due to work commitments etc, the floodgates opened. Faced with 100s of colours of wool, lots of gorgeous wool yarns and fabrics and silks, it was hard not to go overboard (did I overcook it?) Initially I was just going to make a few little samples to play with but once I got going I thought I might as well make a nice big piece!
It is about 70 cm square before felting.


The great thing about felting is that there is no right or wrong way to do it.
How you make felt artwork is up to you - it doesn't have to be hardwearing or a specific size or thickness it just has to look nice. So thick or thin, small or large it doesn't matter - the key is to experiment!  And if something doesn't felt in how you want it to - then you can stitch over it later!

My picture is now sat on my table waiting to be felted.  Then I'm looking forward to getting out the sewing machine, embroidery threads, tapestry wools and yarns, and stitching into it.  I feel like going a little crazy on this one but maybe I should wait and see what it looks like felted first.

Have got an idea for my next piece (and several pieces after that!) but I am going to try to be good and at least felt this one before moving on to the next one!

Creating Felt Artwork eBook

Hello.  It's been a year since we last posted, but it really doesn't feel like it at all because it's been such a busy year!  One of the things we've done is to write our eBook about making felt artwork.  We began our eBook project quite a while ago and it's taken a lot of effort to finish but it's been fun along the way.  The reason for writing the eBook was because we often get asked if we run workshops to show how we make our felt art, but as these enquiries have come from all over the UK, it would be hard for us to make it work.  So instead we've written our eBook - so it could be like having a workshop in your own home!

The eBook comprises 60 pages of clear, step-by-step instructions with colour photographs and lots of handy hints and will enable you to create a version of our ‘Meadow’ (pictured below) or your own design using the same steps with additional information (if you would like more details about our eBook, please click the link at the top of the left hand column).

Flowers are one of our favourite themes for making felt artwork because there is so much room to play with colour and texture, and to create both abstraction and detail.  Now that Spring has sprung I have been taking lots of photos to feed into some new artwork ideas that I will hopefully be working on soon.  Will share the results of my endeavours here!

I also thought I'd share a picture of these lovely creatures, not because I think they will make it into any artwork soon, but because they are so cute!  They are dutifully guarding the grounds at Blenheim Palace, oh and trying to steal from picnics!

 

 

Happy Flowers

Hello, hope you are all well and enjoying the spring weather :)

 

Recently I was really pleased to be asked to make another commission meadow picture.  This one was approx 100cm x 50cm.  We often get asked about how we make our pictures, and the processes we use, so we are now working on an ebook on the subject of making felt artwork, that will be available from this blog. 

 

Machine Embroidered Felt Vase Wraps

The felt I wrote about last time was cut from a much bigger piece.  I had originally been planning to make a large wall hanging but felt a sudden desire to take the scisssors to it and have a play.  I decided to stitch another, bigger piece of the felt so that I could make a couple of vase wraps.  I thought the texture of the felt would be seen better in a 3D item rather than on the wall in this case.  It took hours to stitch but it was very absorbing so I didn't really notice the time until after it was done!

 
I made a large vase (45cm) and a smaller one to compliment (30cm):

They have been delivered to Coastal Creatives Gallery, waiting to find a new home !