trees – Felting and Fiber Studio

Christmas Gifts

December 23, 2021 ruthlane Comments 22 comments

I keep telling myself that I won’t “make” any Christmas gifts this year. It always takes more time than I expect but somehow, here I am again, making gifts. This post has very little fiber in it but there is some, I promise. As a maker, I know that I often venture into trying new things including new media outside of fiber art. I find that trying out a new media gives a new perspective to what I usually create.

My friend Deb is moving to Wisconsin and has been clearing out “stuff” in preparation for a spring move. She had boxes and boxes of driftwood that she had collected over the years and was going to take to the dump. Of course, I couldn’t let that happen so all the boxes of driftwood came home with me. And there I was looking at a source of free material with which to create gifts!

The first thought was to make trees out of the driftwood. All I needed to do was layout the right size pieces, drill holes in the center and thread a piece of heavy duty string through the holes. This is the layout for the first tree I created. You can see a couple of the boxes of the driftwood but that hardly gives you an idea of how much wood I had.

Here’s how the first tree turned out. I liked the look of it and so I decided to make more.

Here’s a few more that I got photos of. I ended up making nine trees total, five of which were mini trees. I still had tons more wood left.

My sister had requested a yard art armadillo, so that was next on my list. I looked through all the pieces and found what looked like parts of an armadillo. It’s amazing what the wood pieces start to look like in your mind’s eye once you start thinking of a variety of animals. So the photos above show the base that I glued and screwed together. I could have left him like that but I decided he needed some birch bark skin. I took a quick walk and found pieces of birch bark in the woods.

The birch bark was quite scrunched up and dirty. So I soaked it in water and then tied it around buckets to get it to be more circular. Sorry for the poor photo but hopefully, you get the idea.

I added the birch bark with a combination of glue and staples. It was pretty tricky and some cursing might have occurred.

Edgar was not sure about the new creature in my studio. Who is this? The only issue with this gift is that my sister lives thousands of miles from me and I didn’t want to try and ship this guy. I was sure that he would be “killed” by the shipping companies. Luckily, my sister is patient and we will take the armadillo to her on our next cross country trip.

And finally some fiber. I found this piece of driftwood that looked like a hat shape. I added a nose with glue and painted the wood. Then I glued down locks for the beard and pieces of felt for the brim and pompom on the hat. And there you have it, a Christmas gnome.

I made a total of three Christmas gnomes. I love how they each have their own personality. Do you make Christmas gifts? If so, we’d love to see what you have created. You can share with us over on the free forum.

I want to thank you all for being loyal readers and wish each of you a wonderful holiday season and a happy, creative new year in 2022.

Inspiration Photos

April 22, 2019 zedster66 Comments 6 comments

The photos of the felt piece I was going to blog about today didn’t turn out, so I thought I’d share some photos I took recently for inspiration. I was up early enough to enjoy some morning sunshine in the back garden, so took lots of photos of anything which caught my attention. The first thing was these little wild geranium flowers which grow everywhere in Spring:

They look nice, but they are really invasive and have a pretty unpleasant smell. I know lots of people hate Dandelions, but I’ve always really liked them. I had no idea the centres looked like this until I got a camera with Supermacro settings:

The next thing was this little glass cabochon. I used it as a weight on a stencil a few weeks ago and it got flecks of spray paint on it:

I’m not sure what this plant is or even if it’s something I bought or something which found its own way here, but it’s another thing whose detail is lost (to me, anyway!) without the Supermacro camera setting:

I’ve taken photos like this before, and I’m pretty sure I’ve shared them on here. This is a leaf from a teasel plant. I love the way it looks when it starts to die/decay:

I love the texture of Sage leaves, especially when they are young:

I’m not sure what is clinging to the ‘hairs’, but here’s a cropped close up:

If any botanists know, please enlighten me! The cat who has adopted us joined me in the garden, she enjoyed rolling around in the dust. She has nice patterns and markings anyway, but the sun seemed to make them more obvious. Even though this is really soft, it reminds me of a hedgehog:

I took this photo because I really like the soft hair behind her ears, but when I looked closer at the photo, I noticed that on just one small part of her head she has lots of different types of hair/hairs:

I only took this photo because I think the cat’s chin is really cute:

But when I looked closer, the fur seemed to be in a kind of pattern, kind of like the pattern of Sunflower seeds or a Dandelion seed-head. I’m not imagining it, am I?

I took these last photos a few weeks ago at the park near the well being centre. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve shared photos of these trees here too, they’re at the entrance and always make me want to photograph them. I thought it was interesting the way the clouds matched up with the trees.

This tree has a really unusual trunk, it seems really fibrous:

There’s a tree behind it which has really interesting seed pods, at least that’s what I think they are! I thought this might be something which Ruth might find inspiration in:

I don’t often sit down and plan a project directly from the inspiration photos I take, but I’m pretty sure the textures, colours and patterns influence my work anyway. Do you take or collect inspiration photos? What do you do with them? Please feel free to use any of these photos for direct or indirect inspiration.