Making lots of felt pictures
In my last post I was talking (among other things) about a 6-week residency I have in a local Michelin-starred restaurant that starts on 2 April. Here’s a link in case you missed it or want a reminder.
https://feltingandfiberstudio.com/2024/01/12/pictures-and-plant-pots/
In this blog I’m offering a quick look at the pictures I’ve made (or am part-way through making) since then. I don’t have the space (or time!) to describe the making processes in a lot of detail but do ask questions in the comments section if you want to know more about something.
The restaurant owners suggested I’d need about 40 pictures to fill the 3+ rooms. I don’t have a lot of spare pictures kicking about – my felt picture making is usually fairly hand-to-mouth – so I really have my work cut out to make enough new work to fill the restaurant walls.
At the time of my last blog, I’d made 1 large and 3 smaller pictures. I then did a series of 4 slightly impressionistic ‘estuary water’ smaller pieces. I live on the north Kent coast of SE England and although it looks like ‘sea’, the stretch of water at the bottom of my road is technically the Thames estuary.
Spring is lightly pre-felted cobweb felts in blue and white laid on a pewter-coloured layer of wool that has a green layer underneath it.
For Summer I made some prefelts which I cut into shapes to try to give the impression of the shifting colours of calm water.
Autumn is altogether more turbulent with a lot of pewter-colour in the water. The estuary is often quite murky-looking. I’ve used either or angora or wool locks for the small wave crests.
And winter, like spring, is white and blue cobweb prefelt on a pewter background, but this time with more of the pewter showing and with pewter for both base layers, no green.
While rummaging through my extensive fibre collection, I came across a lovely hank of hand-dyed wool and silk fibres that I’d bought while on holiday in the USA. I decided to use this for a larger water picture.
Large sea pattern 2: final picture waiting to be framed, the layout and the fibre. The colour representation isn’t very good – the colours in the finished picture are warmer than they look in the photo.
I thought it was time to have a go at a larger bird picture. I’ve previously featured lapwings in a felt picture and thought I’d like to have another go at those. Lapwings are beautiful birds with iridescent feathers that appear to change colour depending on the light. I’d seen a large flock of them at a nearby nature reserve at Oare Marshes. Sorry the quality of these photos is poor, and you can’t see the birds’ colours, but I wanted to show you the lapwings I saw and what their environment looks like.
I started off with some nuno prefelt for lapwing 1 to try to capture that iridescence. These are mostly silk but the black is velvet devore, which I thought might work for the neck feathers. I laid out a bird-shape in white then cut the coloured prefelt to make wing feathers. While I was on a roll, I made another 2 lapwings, testing out different ways of trying to capture the birds’ colours.
Left to right: the layouts for lapwing 1, prefelt for lapwing 1, lapwing 3 and lapwing 2.
Here are the wet-felted bodies that I will needle felt into 2 backgrounds as I add the features: eyes, beaks and legs.
Oare Marshes is a fantastic place to see birds – with a great variety of migratory, overwintering and breeding wetland birds. However, as you can see in my photos, it’s not a conventionally ‘pretty’ place. I want to locate the birds properly so there’s a challenge in making a picture that is appealing while also being representative of the nature reserve.
This is the background for the solo lapwing (lapwing 2!). I’ve used 2 different sections of recycled silk scarves for the land section and merino wool for the water – with a few strips of one of the scarves to look like pebble and mud outcrops. Next comes the lapwing which will be needle felted into place and have its features added.
And here is the final picture
For the other two lapwings I decide to focus on the water rather than the land. Here’s the finished picture, with the lapwings needle felted into place.
I really love watching the birds that visit or live along the coast here. Oystercatchers are very distinctive black and white birds with bright orange eyes and beaks. This is the layout of a coastal background for an oystercatcher. The foreground is made from cut-up prefelt pieces that I’ve made, including some recycled silk fabric; the background is a piece of a beautiful charity shop silk scarf, and I used mostly kid mohair for the wave foam, with a few wool locks.
Here’s the oystercatcher’s body, needle felted into place, then given its eye, beak and legs. The beak is some orange felt I’ve made previously and the legs are recycled tapestry wool. I like how the kid mohair has a wiggly texture.
With an eye on getting the picture numbers up, I branched out a bit and decided to make some smaller monochrome pictures using a commercial merino and silk prefelt with a recycled wool scarf for the foreground. I then printed tree silhouettes onto them.
Once I’d pretty much used up the wool fabric, I tried out some pieces of monochrome silk. This is work in progress as I haven’t yet printed trees onto the other pieces. These aren’t my usual style but it’s good to mix things up a bit and they are comparatively quick to make. I may not put all of these into the restaurant but it’s good to have some options.
In the interest of continuing to mix things up, I then made a larger sea pattern, trying to capture the light and reflections that dance across the water.
And then, most recently, another big bird picture, this time of a curlew. Curlews are the largest European wading birds. They have long, curved beaks and very patterned feathers. Like oystercatchers, curlews can often be seen within a very short walk of my home. The best time to spot them, and lots of other birds, is as the tide starts to go out. They feed along the line of the retreating water. They have a very distinctive call and you can often hear them before seeing them. Unlike oystercatchers, curlews’ (and lapwings’) UK conservation status is ‘red’, which means they are either globally threatened, have a long historical UK population decline or there’s been at least a 50% decline in the UK breeding population over the last 25 years.
Here’s the final curlew picture: cut up prefelt for the pebbles; blue cobweb prefelt over a pewter background for the water; the bird wet felted separately then needle felted into place and given an eye, beak and legs. The beak is made from short lengths of variegated wool yarn and the legs from tapestry wool. The yarn, tapestry wool and silk fabric in the pebbles were all bought in charity shops. I really like the idea of recycling whenever I can, and it’s great that the charities benefit as well.
In the last couple of days I’ve been making 3D oyster and mussel shells. I haven’t decided exactly how I will use these yet, some kind of pictures.
Today I made a light background for one of the mussel shells. It’s still damp in this photo. I think the sea foam area will become lighter as it dries.
I’m still a long way from 40 pictures, although I did have a few already made before I started this picture-making marathon. Now I’ve more or less cleared my diary and I’ve got the rest of March to make more pictures, and to frame them all. I wonder what I’ll do with my spare time?!
I’d be really interested to know what you think so please do leave comments if you have them.
