At the end of the third post https://feltingandfiberstudio.com/2022/08/20/glorious-devon-part-3/ regarding this picture, I left you with an image showing you where I had got to when I had to stop because of a very painful shoulder. This is the image:

After some months during which the pain moved from my shoulder down my arm and into my wrist, I became pain free (relatively) and was able to finish the picture.  Here are the final steps which I took to achieve that.

You may recall from Part 3 that I had decided that the horse, which was the focus of the picture, would be created separately from the picture and added at the end; and that I had got to the stage where I was about to do that.  So now I needed to position the horse on the picture.  After trying a couple of slightly different spots, I finally decided where I wanted it to be on the picture.

Here you will see the horse sort of held in place with a few swift jabs with a needle.  I have moved his tail so that it doesn’t get in the way while I am fixing him down.  I needled the surplus felt at the end of his feet and muzzle into the picture and then covered the white felt with more of the green mixture.  I also needled the lower parts of his legs.  Then I needed to sew the main part of the body to the picture – to avoid him falling out of it.  I used the linen thread that I had previously attached to the back of the body.

And this is a close up of the horse fixed in place .

It was about now that I remembered that the original picture showed a pied wagtail in it near the horse, and that I had wanted to include one if I could.  So I looked up some reference pictures and saved three as they showed me the size that I would need to make the bird in the picture.

And here’s a close up of Willy Wagtail.

And that was it, done.  That is, I managed to stop myself “titivating” after I had tidied up some of the background.  I straightened the horse’s ears and smoothed his tail to allow for the appearance of it being stirred by a breeze, and mounted it. 

Unfortunately, despite umpteen attempts under different lighting, the photograph shows the mount board as blue rather than green, although strangely it doesn’t seem to make much difference to the colours in the picture.

I took the mounted picture along to our local camera shop – which also does bespoke framing – to have the picture properly framed.  The horse, added on top of the bas relief picture meant that they would need to use a deep box frame, but they were to get some samples for me to choose from.  Unfortunately they didn’t, they went ahead with what they had, which resulted in the horse being pressed up against the glass (and I had made it clear that I did not want that to happen).  They had also sealed the frame so that I couldn’t get at the picture (which I had also insisted should not happen because I would need to make sure that the tail and ears were positioned correctly before it was finally sealed).  I found this very disappointing and I was not prepared to accept it, so the picture was removed from the frame and returned to me, along with my deposit.

The picture spent the Christmas and New year holidays sitting in our living room beside my other pictures, while we decided on the next step.  At the time of writing this, I have just returned from taking the picture to a “proper” picture framer. Having spent some time with them deciding on the change of mount board to a forest green colour and choosing a frame which would compliment the picture,  I am fully confident that the result will be just as I want it, and worth the higher cost.

I had hoped that by the time this post was to be published I would be able to add an image of the framed picture, but unfortunately it is not yet ready for me to pick up. I will however put up an image in the 2023 First Quarter challenge section – I have been working on this since late 2020/early 2021 so it must have been a UFO!

Now I can get on with the next picture.