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3D Felt Landscape

3D Felt Landscape

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I sold three of my landscape pieces in March and I need to get more down to the gallery shop soon. So I took five pieces to be framed and I needed to make a few smaller pieces to go in ready made frames. The first one was easy, I made a replica of the holiday exchange card of winter time birch trees. I wrote a post about creating it here.

Here’s the second version. I forgot that I had used two layers of prefelt for the birch trees so they weren’t as white this time. But to me, it just makes it look colder!

Then I needed another idea. I have been watching some artist spotlight videos on the Youtube channel Fibre Arts Take Two and had seen one about the felt maker Kristy Kun. There were several short segments in the video that showed a bit about her process which looked interesting.

Then I walked by this small piece in our living room that I created in Level 3 Art and Design. It’s made with paint, gel medium and cardboard. Perhaps I could recreate this design in felt? And I could attempt some three dimensional felt on the horizon line with a similar method to the video I had just watched.

I first laid out wool in similar colors as the original. I should have noticed at this point that the horizon line was too close to the center vertically but I missed that.

Then I laid out some strips of the dark red and black mixed together in different sizes.

Then I began felting. I only wanted to go to the prefelt stage with both of these elements. The red bits reminded me of bacon the entire time I was felting.

The strips seemed too wide for what I had in mind, so I folded them in half lengthwise and ironed them. Once I figured out what I wanted the arrangement to look like, I began stitching them in place. I used a thread that would blend in so I wouldn’t need to take it out.

Suddenly, I remembered that I was supposed to needle felt these in place before stitching. No worries, I went ahead and needle felted the already stitched pieces and kept going.  Once everything was in place, I felted everything together. I spent a lot of time rubbing the strips in place and making sure that they were holding on to the background felt. I even tried a little underwater felting as I had seen in the video.

Here is the end result. I am happy with how it came out and it is well attached between the strips and the background. It didn’t shrink down as much as I wanted so I will need to find a bit larger frame for it. And I might remove a bit of the bottom to make the horizon line a bit lower. It was a fun experiment and hopefully, someone will love it and take it home.

Post edited to add final photo.

Here is the final photo of the piece in it’s frame. I did trim a bit off the bottom to change the horizon line a little. The frame is 8″ x 10″.

Update on Nuno Felted Landscapes

Update on Nuno Felted Landscapes

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I started working on some nuno felted landscapes in April. It has been stop and start on getting them completed. But I thought I would give you an update on the results so far.

I showed you Flathead Lake at the end of April. I got a few comments on perhaps adding more stitching to the trees. It took a bit of contemplation about whether I should add more stitching. The main reasons I decided to go ahead and add some stitching is to bring the trees more into the foreground and to hide some of the horizontal stitching that I did on the lake area.

I used a #12 variegated cotton thread and free motion stitched the branches. I do like the highlights that it added and it definitely helped cover the horizontal lines of “lake stitching”. Now I need to find a “matte” fabric and get it ready for framing.

 

This is another background. I decided to hand stitch this one. I’m not sure why since it is the biggest one. It should take me quite a while especially since I have become disenchanted with it. I was working on it steadily but that has gone by the wayside.

Here it is after stitching the distant pine trees.

Then I stitched more foliage and aspen trees. I am using seed stitch and using a variety of colors. I was thinking it was similar to impressionist paintings with little dots of color. I think painting is significantly faster than stitching. So this is definitely a slow stitch piece.

Here’s a closer look at the stitches. I think I got discouraged because I still had so much to fill. I will be adding some different stitches into the foreground but I have to get the further distances completed before I can start on the foreground. What do you do when you get discouraged in the middle of a project? I have been working on other stuff, so it isn’t that I am not doing anything. But this one is not very appealing right now. Any suggestions?

Slow Stitching

Slow Stitching

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This is the landscape (on the left) that I showed you in my last post. I made a few changes including some new felt to indicate mountains in the distance and changing the diagonals in the foreground.  I was originally going to machine stitch this in place on its background of white felt but decided to do some “slow” stitching. So I am hand appliqueing all the pieces down. I didn’t want the machine stitch to overpower the simple shapes.

Here you can see the stitches a bit closer. I am using a machine thread and a short sharps needle to stitch each piece in place. Some of the pieces are overlapping and some are butted up against each other.

Most of the sky is stitched down and because I didn’t have a big enough piece of dark blue felt for the sky, I cut up the pieces into irregular triangles. I’m not sure if you can see or not but this is felt that had been printed and then over-dyed so there is some pattern in the sky that along with the triangular pieces is definitely giving some interest that a single, plain blue piece of felt would not display.

 

I have now started stitching down the blue mountain shapes and as I stitch, some of the felt pieces have shifted a little. I may also add either some more color to some of the mountains as the white is definitely bringing them to far forward and is distracting. But I will work on that once everything is stitched in place.

I do have a piece of silk that is shown in the upper left of this photo that I am considering using as clouds. I would have it in much smaller pieces and I’m not sure I’ll even use it but I might. What do you think? Do you think it needs clouds? Is that fabric too light in value against the really dark sky? I hope you don’t get bored with this piece as it will take me a while since I am stitching by hand.

Bits and Bobs

Bits and Bobs

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I made a couple of felt pieces to use as lampshade covers not so long ago, one of them wasn’t nice at all, it looked okay, but it was made with Shetland, and what I think is Corriedale (from a bag of Botany Lap Waste) and now I understand why people shiver at wool! I used that one for the shade, but couldn’t get a decent photo. The other piece I made is going to be a removable ‘skirt’ when I think of how to attach it. It’s a bit crinkled because it ended up under a pile of things!

A while ago we made pouches using resists at the well being centre. I think I might rewet this and reshape it as a bottle cover:

We’re going to start learning some techniques for making felt landscape pictures at the Well Being Centre. After we were talking about it I showed the group the picture Tracey blogged about not so long ago:

I also showed some of Marion/Blyth Whimsies gorgeous floral pieces: https://www.flickr.com/photos/24232165@N03/albums/72157681820827174 I don’t think we’ll be making anything on that scale though! To get started we made some really simple landscapes, I like doing these, they’re usually around postcard size:

I made it clear that landscapes aren’t something I’m particularly good at or experienced with, Mine are usually simple like that above or very abstract like this:

But, I know fibres and effects and techniques, so we’re going to start with those and build up the skills to make more adventurous pieces. We’re going to start with making simple things like wool strands and twists:

Wool kebabs … I recently read something that when small rolags (usually of cotton) are made, they’re called ‘punis’. But I think these are even smaller, and I’ve been calling them ‘kebabs’ – because they’re rolled around a kebab stick-for so long it’s just stuck now!

Handspun yarn, singles, plied, mixed with fibres or commercial yarns etc:

Coils and Spirals:

We’re probably going to buy some prefelt, but we’ll make our own too:

And combine all the things:

And add things like leaves and flowers, nepps, fibres etc. And hopefully, we’ll all be landscape experts before long! Luckily, we have a group member who is amazing at hand-stitching and embroidery and our very own Free Motion Embroidery expert so we can embellish on the sewing machines too 🙂

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