Thanks to Lyn from Rosiepink for sharing her 3rd Quarter Challenge Entry with us today.

I found the first step in the Third Quarter Challenge (generating a colour palette from a photo) very time-consuming because I was fascinated by the process and just kept feeding photos into the generator!  I used http://www.palettefx.com/

Eventually I chose a photo of a photo that I took on last year’s holiday.  Her Majesty The Queen and Prince Philip are pictured in a room in the castle on the top of St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, and the photo is displayed on a table in the same room.

I decided to make felt beads, so I chose five colours from the palette then blended many different colours of merino wool tops on my large hand-carders to achieve them.  I didn’t blend them to the max because I wanted the colours to be a little mottled. I’d printed the colour palette onto paper then used it as a blending guide, but the blues, although a good match for my printed guide, look different in the photo below to those in the image above, but printed versions are not always faithful to screen versions!

I planned to make a large multi-coloured felt ‘bead’ to cut into segments to make many beads.  I didn’t want smooth regular lines dividing the colours, so the wool fibres were put down roughly.  Yellow first.

I gently dry-rolled the fibres a little, spritzed them with soapy water, then very carefully rolled them for a few seconds using the mat not my hands.  It then looked a bit like a baguette.

I laid out the aqua-blue in a rough rectangular shape, spritzed it with soapy water, then rolled the yellow up into the aqua-blue.

I rolled it gently in the mat for a few seconds then placed it onto the summer-blue.

I carried on in the same way until I had used all five colours – ending with the darkest.
The giant felt bead was very fragile at the beginning so I didn’t want to put pressure on it with my hands. I rolled it using just a bamboo mat by flicking it backwards and forwards …

… and by rolling it, hammock-style, until it began to firm up.

I then hand-rolled it on the bamboo mat for 45 minutes, rinsed it, and put it in a warm place to dry for about 36 hours.  The finished bead, point to point, measured 14″ (35.5cm).

I used a craft knife to slice it into beads of varying thicknesses. Some cuts were made on the diagonal to produce oval beads, some cuts were straight to produce round beads, and the largest beads were cut in half.

I threaded 3 thick-cut beads and 10 half-beads onto a metal choker.  To get the placement as I wanted, I laid the beads on top of the metal then marked the curve by sticking dressmaker pins vertically into the felt beads.  I then stitched the half-beads together in their groups, so that in effect I had 7 wide beads. I made holes in the beads with a thick darning needle using the pins to guide the position of the hole.  Then it was (fairly) simple to thread the beads onto the choker.  I had been thinking about how to anchor the beads in place on the metal, but the felt is so dense that the beads stay in place on their own!