This is a guest post by Carole G. one of our forum members. You can follow her here: 

https://www.facebook.com/BagsaLicious/

https://craftybeetle.wordpress.com/

I love forests, the magical paths that lead you through oaks, birch, beech and ash and the faces, there are always faces to be seen in tree trunks.

It is this imaginary along with my curiosity about the ‘Greenman’ and the many ways he is depicted that has taken me along a path of my own. A path of experimenting with leaves, print, shapes to eventually create my own ‘Greenman’.

Part of this journey including using paints, hand dyed fabric, freehand machine stitch, trapping fabrics together with stitch, I even tried trapunto, my final attempt was using merino and bits of fabric with stitch then cutting out shapes. I’m not particularly happy with the final piece but I adored the journey and will revisit this in the future.

First of all I decided to paint paper and print leaf shapes on to it.

Then I decided to use sun dyes to create leaf shapes on fabric ( I haven’t tried this on felt but I think it would work the same way) and highlight the shapes using a freehand machine stitch technique called trapunto.

My next leg of the journey was to explore ways using freehand stitch and trapped merino and other fibres to create leaf like images.

Moving on I decided on the trapped fibre approach and made up a few leaves before trying them out as a Greenman face.

Moving on I needed a backing for this man of the woods, so I painted up some burlap to keep a rustic feel going and hung him from a branch.

You can follow my creative meanderings on both:

https://www.facebook.com/BagsaLicious/

https://craftybeetle.wordpress.com/