Just a quit little post to show you the sheep I have been working on for my Christmas sales. They do stand up so you can use them as a decoration but they will all have a pin on one side so you can wear them.
Colourful Sheep
They are made with a combination of wet felting and needle felting. The ears are cut from a wet felted piece of fabric and I wet felt the snakes I cut for the legs. The body and head are needle felted. The ears, eyes and all the curls are added with needle felting. I hand dyed the curls. They are Border Leicester or Blue Faced Leicester I can’t remember.
I was asked about my cityscape in gallery so I thought I would tell you about it. I made it about 3 years ago so there are no pictures of it going together . The base is wet felted. There are 2 layers of merino, then a layer of cotton gauze and then 2 more layers of merino. I added the cotton gauze to make sure it wouldn’t sag when the temperature and humidity goes up. I do live in Canada and although many people think its cold here all the time the summer temperature gos up above 85 frequently and we get high humidity to go with it. I also wet felted several rectangles in diferant colours for the buildings and the windows. To put it together I used a little feltcraft needle felting machine.
small feltcraft needlfelting machine.
I placed all the buildings on the background and then tacked them in place by hand. Just a few quick jabs to keep them where I wanted them. I then went over all over them thoroughly with the little machine. I only broke a few needles.
I put the windows in with a single needle first. I was afraid they would disappear if the corners were not well anchored. Then went over them again with the machine. The moon and the haze around it where put in the same way. The stars are pearl beads, hand stitched to the background . Originally I wanted to sell this one so I made a smaller one to keep. I ended up keeping them both. I never did offer it for sale. The moon in the smaller picture isn’t actually blue. the felt I used to make it was quite thin and the black showing through it makes it look blueish.
wet and machine felted aprox 20×15wet and machine felted picture aprox 10×10
To start I apologise for the formatting but no matter how many times I fix it, it changes when I save It. I hope you can read it alright.
Last weekend I taught needle felting to a group of ladies at Just Knitting in Carleton Place Ontario. They were learning the basics by making Easter eggs.
Here they are starting with their core wool. That’s me on the left, in the orange.
Beginning to Felt
Here they’ve covered the eggs in a base colour and they are adding decorations.
Adding Colour
Here are four completed eggs
Easter Eggs
One of the ladies wanted to do a matryoshka doll. She didn’t have time to finish during class so she took some wool home.
Matryoshka dollmatryoshka finished
Another decided hers looked more like a chick and added a beak and wings.
Blue Chic
Two weeks ago I did a wet felted bird house class. I forgot to take pictures during class but did get one at the end of the class. The lady on the right has felted before and brought wool from her flock. It was Rideau Arcott wool. It is a down breed. She knew it might not work the way she wanted but wanted to give it a try. Her bird house didn’t shrink very much and it needs a lot more work to sturdy it up. She ended up putting them through the washer twice and they still haven’t shrunk much or hardened up. It is the nature of this wool. It was an interesting experiment.
For the second quarter challenge I thought abstract representation would be a good one. Take a picture, landscape or portrait and do it over as an abstract. There are many kinds of abstract design. Here are 3 pictures to give you some style ideas.
I like to do abstracts. Trying to make something that is life like is just an exercise in frustration for me. Abstracts give my artistic side a chance to express itself.
If you’d like to join in, please join our Flickr group and post your photos there with a tag of “Abstract challenge”. Or if you have your own blog, post about the challenge and then come back here and leave us a comment with a link so we can go check out your abstract piece or process. We’ll put all the links into one of our Felting Around the Web posts so that everyone can see.
As you know I wasn’t very happy with the dryer felt I did last week but I thought I would try some nunofelt. This went much better. I made this piece called snowy night.
Snowy Night
I used fine merino on a silk chiffon. It was inspired by the snow falling outside my window the other night. I had tried this before without being all that happy. I use plastic top and bottom as recommended but didn’t like it. I went back to using my sheer curtains. I did rub it on the back for about 5 min. There wasn’t a lot of wool on this one. I rolled it up around a damp towel an then wrapped another one around it , tied it up and tossed it in the dryer with no heat for 20 min. when I rook it out is was attached somewhat to the sheer. When I roll by hand this happens too. I carefully peeled it off . I though it was done really well and ready to full. For some reason I though I would roll it up the other way and give it more time in the dryer to be sure. I opened the dryer to find everything had come undone and was in a pile. When I untangled everything I found the scarf was completely fulled and very close to dry. I need ironing but I havn’t done that yet.
Felt Easter Eggs
I made these Easter eggs the other night. I will be teaching an Easter egg class at Just knitting in Carleton Place, Ontario. If your close why not join in.
Periodically, we’ll be posting about fun felting projects that we’ve found other people are doing. If you’d like to be included in one of these posts, please leave a comment and the URL of the post you’d like featured.
