Felt Mushroom
Teri wrote a post a while back about making mushrooms. She inspired me to give it a try. I already had a small circle resist (7 inch diameter) and just needed to add the stem. I cut a rectangular piece of floor underlayment (6.5 inches x 2.5 inches) to add to the circle.
Here it is after I duct taped it together. Now ready for wool. I wanted the process to be fairly quick so I chose some colors from my selection of short fiber merino which felts very quickly.
I decided to ad a few pieces of pre-yarn in brown to the base. I should have put these on the outside layer but I covered with more yellow before wetting down.
Here you can see both sides of the mushroom resist covered with four layers of wool and wet down. Then on to rubbing and making sure the edges were taken care of so I wouldn’t end up with a ridge around the resist.
Here’s the mushroom before I removed the resist.
Once it was partially felted, had a good skin and starting to shrink, I removed the resist. Then on to working the cut edges and begin more aggressive felting, fulling and shaping.
And here’s the finished mushroom on a plastic base with a rod in the center to hold the mushroom erect. I didn’t quite get the bottom even enough for it to stand on it’s own. This was a fun, quick project and I plan on making a few more with a bit more surface design next time. Thanks for the inspiration Teri!