Black and white

When I knew I was going to be away from home from my felting studio and all my felting fluff, yet still with some felting time , I decided to keep it simple and just take black and white fibre with me . Black to make some jewellery and white to make a textured piece for my course.

The textured piece required me to make cords , balls and use resists to capture the texture of my theme . I deliberately kept it all small , no space to do otherwise!

Here are the balls and cords, with a few wooden beads thrown in.

The final piece , I think giving some impression of waves and rocks , well maybe. I am cross with myself for making a mistake I have made many times , placing the beads and the balls too close together to be really effective.

For my black theme I have been playing with incorporating beads and buttipons into rings and brooches . I think one of the keys is to make sure the bead or button is very secure and can't rock before you start felting. Easy to say , but quite hard to achieve on such a small scale.

Here my brooches , which need a little bit of stitching to be finished.

My rings are less successful . I intended to remake two of them , because also they look OK in the photo , I am not happy with the feel of them.

Still some more black and white time available so that should be easy.

 

 

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Wild colour

A number if months ago I made a mixed fabric felt piece threw it in the mx dye bath , and got a very surprising for result .

I received the comment for Kate my tutor that dying animal and vegatable fibres together would not work , except perhaps with natural dyes. I had a book called Wild Color by Jenny Dean and a vision in my head of the piece I want to make so I decided to explore the avenue of natural dying, I have been researching , mordants, modifiers and natural dyes. What a complicated business it is.! I have made up some copper , iron and aluminum mordant solutions and mordanted some silk and cotton fabrics .

What I did not know , was if you mordanted a fabric or fibre and then felt it , is the mordant still active. I decided to do some small experiments because I am conserving my mordanted fabric . I love the effect I have achieved but I am not sure I can answer my own question yet.

Carrots tops from the garden

Ivy from the garden

And on a slightly larger scale onions skins.

I am approaching my vision now and I am going to continue exploring wild color.

 

 

 

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Collages

Well September has always been the time for me for a restart. The beginning of the new school year. Lovely Autumn mornings , and the sense that anything is possible.

Well as I am still to finished my intermediate C&G felting course, i have had no sense of that new beginning this year. I really don't have much to do to finished the course yet somehow it seems very hard to finished it all off. I can find lots of others things to do instead . Dying , stitching , making jewelry.

My stumbling block with the course is some collage work that I started months ago. I needed an image with a background , mid ground and foreground to make a series of collages. Just one image you understand. I could find three images and I played around switching between them without finishing any thing, I also needed to scan photos into photoshop and manipulate them . I have done that with all my half finished work and made some crazy images of which this is one example.

So this week , in the spirit of the new year , I decided I had to just focus , on one image and complete three different collages.

Here is my rather rocky image.

 

Half finished found objects collage.

Now completed with some old table runner rocks, stitched and printed with acrylic piant. Looking very strange I think.

Half finished low relief collage.

Now completed with some paper sea , sand and rocks.

I had no textile collage in this theme . So I have made one, covered it with Gesso and so now just have some printing and painting to do. Tomorrow's job.

Finally I feel as if I can move on. But what I am going to do with these collage masterpieces I have no idea.

 

 

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