Sunday 10 February 2019

Felting the landscape...

My latest piece of felting is of a landscape - not of a particular place, but just what evolved out of the colours and fibres that I chose to use.

My colours were inspired by the contents of my little tray of nature finds which is filled with lots of treasure like feathers, acorns, pine cones, seed heads and even some wool rescued from barbed wire whilst walking in Wales. 

I often look at my little collection of 'things' for inspiration, whether it be for shapes and forms or textures and colours.



Using that lovely warm, autumnal palette, I gathered together some wool fibres, yarns and silks to compliment each other with a view of blending them to make lots of tones rather than contrasts.



So I start the process of laying out the fibres, starting with a few light layers of white.



Then starts the fun bit...layering up with different fibres, yarns and silks to create an interesting surface texture in a 'landscape'.  I had some Christmas money which I invested in a pair of hand carders which are proving well worth the purchase - I'm still getting the hang of them (I always just used to use my fingers to mix colours)  but it's a great way to blend colours together in larger quantities, just in the same way you might mix paints together.



More layers....


...and more layers...snippets and scraps all going in the mix.



The photo below shows how it looks after felting and drying (hooray for the aga lid!) - I'm pretty happy with it, though there are a few little tweaks to be made with needlefelting and lots of details to put in with stitching to bring it to life.  It might take me a while to decide exactly how to finish this one off, but I quite like the idea of incorporating a few of the items from my nature finds - what do you think?  I'm also playing with the idea of adding either a bird or maybe a white hare...so this is still definitely a work in progress!  I'm sure the right thing will come to mind if I give it a few days!


There's a lot of lovely textures in this, which are difficult to pick up with the camera (on a dull day!) so hopefully when worked into more I can take some better photos to show the details.

So hopefully I'll have it finished by my next blog post...

Other news...

I finished up and framed a couple of new pictures - 'Stacked' and 'Blooming Lovely' - and these have been taken down to Blue Bramble Gallery in St Ives together with my 'Nice Jugs' piece.


Also, my 'Golden Blooms II' has gone to a lovely forever home, which makes me very happy...😊


When I get chance, I think I'll set up a separate page on my website as a gallery of work which would be nice to browse and also good for me to look back on!

Right, didn't want to make this post too long so I'll sign off for now - thank you for taking the time to read and do feel free to leave a comment even if it's just to say 'Hi'!

Best wishes

Tanya
xx