Today we have the second in a series of guest post from Forum member Tracey:

I approached a gallery recently to ask if they would be interested in stocking my felt cards.  I took along four cards, three flower and one cottage picture.  I was thrilled when they bought all four! I only have pictures of two of them:

When I was next in the gallery the owner said ‘ We like your little house, can you make a larger picture’, Oh yes I said, whilst inwardly thinking – PANIC!

So here is my attempt.  Firstly I laid out white Merino wool for the sky and added blended blues, white silk caps and blue and white silk throwsters waste.  I then started on the bottom sections laying out green Merino, I didn’t blend the colours but pulled them into sections of wool, as I wanted a rolling hill feeling.

In the  next picture, I guess you will be wondering why the grey thick band, well I am planning to build my first wall! I blended greys with a little charcoal colour and added little bits of white here and there.

I then continued to build the picture adding my little house, this was cut from prefelts.  Prefelt is the stage between soft wool fibres and fully fulled felt, you can make your own or it can be bought commercially. You can use it to cut shapes, lay it on your work and it will felt into your piece. A few trees and wool nepps (little wool balls) by the house, and as the hills had emerged into a dip shape, I couldn’t resist adding a bit of sunshine!

So here is my picture after felting.

Then it is time for a little FME (Free Motion Embroidery).  Some (not all) sewing machines allow you to do this. If you can drop the feed dogs (the little ‘teeth’ that guide the fabric) you will be able to do this.  In effect you are then ‘drawing’ using the needle on your machine, the needle is your pencil!  Because the feed dogs are dropped, it is then down to you to guide the fabric, whilst the needle is drawing. The skill to master is controlling the speed of the machine in conjunction with moving the fabric. I really enjoy it.  Initially I drew the stones in with a magic fabric marker to follow, but then I grew more confident and went freestyle!

For the rest of the picture, I didn’t want to define much of the ‘distance’ with FME, as I wanted it to look exactly that – distant.  I did a little on the tree trunks though.
I then concentrated more on my wall, needle felting some dark sections, especially where the stones had ended up quite a strange shape!, good how you can cover and change your mistakes…..

So here is the completed  piece. I added a few FME grasses and French knot flowers by the wall. Apologies to any dry stone wallers out there!