I am continuing with my experiments with how fiber layout and prefelt effect the shape of three dimensional wet felt. I decided to combine two of the things that I had tried before.
The first was the circular layout that I showed you in this post. The cone above was made with the same circular layout. I used orange wool and laid it in a circular pattern to make a small circle. Then I used an idea from Kim Winter of Flextiles which she showed in this post. I cut up some old felt into pieces and made sure the back fibers were roughed up.
Here’s the layout. There is a resist under the circle but I didn’t use it. It was just to get the circular shape easily. I removed it before felting. I then got so involved in working on the piece that I forgot to take any photos until I was finished. But I wet this down, turned it upside down and worked from the back side for quite a while rubbing and making sure that the yellow felt pieces were attaching. It actually worked better than I thought it would and the old felt attached right down to the orange wool. Thanks for the tip Kim!
Here is the result. When I was felting and fulling this piece, I kept working around in a circle so that the orange wool would shrink into a cone shape. With the addition of the yellow felt, the shape was definitely effected by the radiating felt shapes. It turned into a squash blossom all by itself! The formation of the 3D shape developed with minimal effort and shaping on my part.
Since it looked so much like a squash blossom, I added it to my squash pod from last week. They went together like I had planned it from the beginning. Of course if I had planned it, I don’t think they would have worked so well, but cheers for happy accidents.