This week I have been reviewing and putting a bit of polish on my notes for Saturdays workshop. I will be teaching needle felted landscape again. I have 6 students singed up, which is a full class, and have just sent out the instruction note about where to park and what room the workshop is in. I also sent them some landscapes to look at and hopefully they can choose one to create on Saturday.

Since I don’t know the levels of the students I pulled a selected, some that would be easier to do and some that would be more challenging.  I also reminded them that they are now God of their landscape and if a trees position offends their WA, they can move or remove it.

I reread my notes and upgraded a few areas.

I had found a colour wheel that was a visual way of suggesting what combination of colours make up the component parts of the colour wheel. I have not seen this representation before and found it visually intriguing.

At the end of my notes I had added some tips on blending and working on a felted picture.  I will be showing them how I hand blend small amounts to get the colour I want and how I layer small wisps to build up layers towards the colour I finally want to achieve. This gives more depth and luminosity to my pictures.

Blending colours

I tend to hand blend small batches of colour as I go.

If you need a larger amount of a single colour the dog brushes or hand combs can be helpful

******NB do not use colour that is over-blended especially for your top layers. Nature is not made of flat colour. It is always affected by light. It will look more realistic whether it’s a tree or a fox or a sheep if you leave your colours slightly unmixed.

I have found that using fiber from bats is a bit easier to hand blend and to needle felt than from roving or top. This doesn’t mean I don’t use roving or top if I find the rite colours but I do tend to watch for bats of partly mixed colours in shades of greens, browns, and blues particularly.

I have found a couple of venders at Twist and Almonte fiber festival selling packages of fiber (wool) in a range of colours. (I have had good results from wool from venders like Fibre Craft, the Olive Sparrow and Wellington Fiber.) This makes blending the colour you need easier if you have warm and cool versions of the basic colours on hand. Keep an eye out for packages with shades of red to orange, pink to violet, greens, blues, browns and shades of gray are also vary helpful in blending.

I have also found random died locks can be fun to work with too. (Adele’s Locks of Love and other venders have these.)

Tips on Blending and felting;

• – As you work compare the colour you blend with the original image
• Take Digital pictures of your work regularly checking the image on the camera or on your I-pad. It is similar to looking in a mere and will give a better indication of how your work is progressing
• Remember to look at the negative spaces to check your proportions. But it is your landscape if you want a tree to gain or lose a bit of weight that up to you.
• Working with your picture and landscape upside down will sometimes make your brain focus more on the image. Working this way will often give you an easier time with the perspective and negative spaces.

My notes this time were 23 pages plus 10 pages of images for the students to work from.  It looks like tomorrow will be another snow day so I will finish printing out the notes and try to figure out why the landscape option keep printing out blank pages.

Next week I will let you know how the workshop goes and will hopefully have a few nice pictures for you. I hope if you are having a snowed-in-winter-day you will have a chance to pull out some wool and make something fun!