My ‘Tree in the Spring’ depicted in felt
I have an ‘Amelanchier Canadensis’ in my garden. Every March its red/brown branches are covered in a mass of white, star-shaped flowers that slowly give way to bronze coloured leaves that gradually turn spring green.
I would love to show you a photo of it in full flower in my garden, but I don’t have one yet! So on 20th Feb I took this photo to show the red/brown branches with the promise of flowers next month.

So, how can I show this tree, in full flower, in felt for the First Quarter Challenge?
As usual, the thinking time of this project outweighed the doing time but I eventually settled on depicting part of a branch rather than the whole tree.
I planned to wet-felt a background, wet felt the flowers, then needle felt the whole thing together to (hopefully) achieve a 3D effect and I wanted the background to be a blurry representation of the garden behind the branch – as in the photo above.
So I put down three layers of bronze coloured Merino wool fibres (as a nod to the colour of the leaves to come) then topped them with a layer of ‘winter-into-spring garden colours’. This is the dry layout.

After felting, and while it was drying, I sent a photo to my daughter, Annie, and asked if I had it wrong – did it look like a doormat?
She makes me laugh a lot, just look at her reply …

So here’s the dry background – the under layers of bronze came through much stronger than I thought they would, but I decided to go with it.

I wet-felted the flowers – some buds, some semi-open and three flowers fully out.

I then set to with the felting needle. I formed the branches with red Merino wool fibres and attached the white flower shapes. I used grey Merino wool fibres to detail the flowers and outline them, then green/red Merino wool fibres to make the bit where the branch joins the flower.


To finish I added three fully opened flowers. I tried to needle-felt some yellow and green nepps into the centres but it was very tricky and difficult, so they are only loosely held in place but as this piece is just for me I think that’s ok. The finished piece measures 46 x 46cm (18″x18″)

Have you had a go at this quarter’s challenge? If you missed the announcement, please see here First Quarter Challenge