I am working on my third nuno felted landscape piece. This one was made with “Halloween” cloth which is some type of cheese cloth that is black but very loose weave.
Here’s the piece before stitching. I used nepps for the bear grass and then a bit of green for foreground grass and purple for the sky. I left it very loose and full of holes as I was planning on adding a background behind it. I was thinking stormy skies when I was creating it.
I then added green wool thread and couched it down for the stems and leaves. If you don’t know what bear grass is, here’s a photo.
Here’s a little closer view of the stitching. Now I had to decide on the background color. I tried a bunch. Here are a few of my choices.
I tried a bunch of shades of blue. Then I threw in an orange and a magenta to get more contrast. For stormy skies, I think the bottom left one works the best, it’s a dark blue and purple background. But I can find merit in all of the colors. Perhaps I could make a changeable background and you could insert a new background depending on your mood. But that doesn’t sound very practical. Which one do you like?
I seem to be a little stuck on landscapes lately. When I first read Ann’s 2nd Quarter Challenge I immediately thought I could do a stitched strip landscape. I have seen these in a variety of formats either with fabric or paper. So I decided I wanted to do one with felt scraps. I have lots of strips of felt that were cut off the edges of things and most I can’t even remember what half of the projects were to begin with.
I got out all my scraps and sorted them into color piles. Some of these scraps were screen printing scraps and others from a variety of projects. The table these are laying on is 6 feet long to give you an idea of how many scraps I have.
I cut a piece of thin interfacing for a background. Some of my felt scraps were pretty thick so I didn’t want anything thick for the background as it wouldn’t fit under the sewing machine easily. Luckily, I cut this larger than 5″ x 7″ because it worked out that the landscape will fit in a 5″ x 7″ matt which is a standard size here in the US. I then started auditioning different scraps to make a landscape.
This is the layout that I came up with. The bottom brownish green felt is really thick and I was a bit worried it wouldn’t work but decided to just try it anyways. The sky and the felt right under the mountains were screen printed scraps.
I started by stitching the screen printed scraps that were towards the middle of the landscape. I didn’t tack anything down but just stuck it under the sewing machine and free motion stitched the pieces down. I cut off the ends hanging over each edge as I went along.
Here it is after stitching down the sky and then the mountains. I didn’t try to add much detail with the stitching, I really stitched just enough to hold the pieces down.
On the orange piece closer to the foreground, I did add a little bit of stitched detail representing grasses.
Here’s what it looked like after I finished the machine stitching. I put it under a matt to cover the rough edges. It seemed like it needed a bit more in the foreground.
Here in Montana in the spring, we have a plant called Beargrass. I decided to add a stalk of Beargrass to the foreground. This shows the cut up pieces of white felt being auditioned.
I hand stitched a stem and leaves and then stitched each small piece of white felt down by hand with white thread. And this is the finished landscape. The pile of scraps I started with hasn’t shrunk in the least so I’m sure I could make another 8-10 landscapes with the rest of the scraps and still have some to spare. I do have some other unfinished projects that I might also work on with this challenge. Maybe I can do one for each month of the challenge. I will post my results if I do more.
Don’t forget that today is the last day to sign up for my online class Nuno Felting with Paper Fabric Lamination that begins on Friday, April 29th. You can sign up here. It’s going to be a fun class so I hope you’ll join me.
