I love texture, especially natural textures such as lichen, bark, fungus, moss… I could go on and on. I have tons of photographs of these types of surfaces and I’m always inspired by looking closely at them. So my challenge for the first quarter is related to surface texture. I want you to go exploring and find an interesting texture that inspires you. You don’t have to limit yourself to the natural world. Perhaps you are inspired by a rusting piece of old machinery, multiple layers of posters stuck to a wall, peeling paint on the side of a boat or whatever captures your fancy.

Once you’ve found the texture you’d like to develop into a work of fiber art, take photos. I’d love to see your working process with this challenge. Since you have three months, take your time and see where the original inspiration takes you. Perhaps you just jump right in and just start laying out fibers to felt or whatever it is you do. Or maybe you draw some sketches and paint some pages in your journal, make some samples and then begin your final challenge piece. Show me your working process and how you got from the photo to your finished piece.

All four of us here will be posting periodically through the next three months for the challenge. If you’d like to join in, please join our Flickr group and post your photos there with a tag of surface texture challenge. Or if you have your own blog, post about the challenge and then come back here and leave us a comment with a link so we can go check out your surface texture piece or process. We’ll put all the links into one of our Felting Around the Web posts so that everyone can see.

What surface texture inspires you? Please do tell! I know I’m not the only one who is taking photos of odd things while everyone else is taking photos of the scenery. 🙂