Happy Creative New Year – Let The Challenges Begin!
‘The Felting and Fiber Forum’ devise quarterly challenges to encourage us all to have a go at developing our fibre skills – there’s no entry fee, no judging, nor any prize money! But there’s the potential for experimentation and fun and anyone can join in by simply posting a photo of their challenge piece on the forum.
This year the theme for the challenges will be ‘scapes’ and the first quarter challenge is ‘landscapes’.
The size of your landscape doesn’t matter – it can be postcard size or ten feet high or anywhere in between.
It doesn’t have to be wall art – your landscape could feature on a cushion or your comfy slippers or a greetings card.
Your landscape can be realistic or abstract and you can use whatever fibre skills and materials you like.
Here are a few landscapes made in different ways:
Jan used needle felting to make this snowy landscape. She describes how she made it in this blog post.
Ruth used mixed media – left-over pieces of handmade felt, yarn and hand-stitching – to create this landscape. To read more about it please see this blog post.
Annie used free motion machine stitching on pieces of handmade felt to make a mini-landscape tea-light cover…
…and this tiny, quirky landscape. It’s just 10cm x 10cm (4″x 4″). The background was felted using handmade pre-felts and nepps.
Tracey used wool fibres to make the background to her landscape then added details with pre-felts, free motion machine stitching, needle-felting and hand embroidery. Tracey describes the making of her landscape in this blog post.
Zed made this landscape using loose wool fibers to create the background then added foreground embellishments of kapok, silk, trilobal nylon, viscose and nepps. Read about the making of this landscape in more detail in this blog post
Karen added simple stitching to a piece of her handmade nuno-felt to create this landscape. Karen writes about her experience with nuno felt in this blog post.
We hope these lovely felty pieces have inspired you to have a go at this challenge! It would be great to see some new landscapes on the forum.
21 thoughts on “Happy Creative New Year – Let The Challenges Begin!”
Bravo everyone featured here. Your techniques are inspiring. The result are beautiful
There are so many ways of achieving a landscape Suzanne – glad you liked those shown!
A great Challenge. Great examples. This fits in so well with what I want to do this year, thanks
Thanks Ann – we hope it will appeal to a lot of people!
Thanks Lyn for a great challenge. I am looking forward to creating some scapes and seeing what everyone else creates.
Thanks Ruth – I hope I can produce something too.
Great Challenge, Lyn!
I will get my thinking cap on 🙂
Get the group to have a go too Zed!
Great idea, Lyn 🙂
All wonderful pieces for inspiration! A wonderful challenge. Thanks!
Thank you Marilyn – let’s hope everyone has a go no matter whether beginner or old hand!
What beautiful inspiring examples.
This year I WILL transpose the challenge ideas in my head and get them through my fingers to completion, thus far i’ve had many ideas….but….i’ve let life and ‘things’ get in the way! So i’ve come clean and said it publicly and in line with Ruth’s previous thoughts will create more fibre time for me.
Thanks for this challenge Lyn
Thank you Antje.
The challenges are good because they give you something to focus on and once you’ve got focus the piece is half-made!
When you’re working from home it is more difficult to carve out creative time than if you had a studio to travel to. Family, friends and other callers presume you’re ‘free’ when you’re at home.
Love your style. Wish I had the patience to do what you do.
Thank you! Your journal pictures are wonderful – so you must have some patience and you certainly have talent.
Love your work. You’re an artist in a unique medium.
Thank you Ruth!
Those are so neat. That’s the one fiber thing I haven’t tried yet.
Please do have a go at the challenges – they’re fun!