Felting Experiments

Recently I came across a wonderful little felting tutorial on You Tube. I have been interested in creating some felted flowers for quite awhile and here were some very intriguing instructions.  this rose was my very first attempt and I am thrilled with the simplicity of the technique.  All of the petals are felted as one piece using plastic for resists.  To the merino tops, I added some silk fibers in various colors as I did not have any appropriate colored silk hankies as the tutorial called for.  Check out the video and go make some felt roses!!

After being inspired by my friend Ro Bruhn's fabulous felting examples, I pulled out the fibers and fabric ( silk and scraps of felted sweaters) and had a go for myself.  This truly was just for play and was a decompression exercise following my whirlwind Workshop of last week.

To start I laid out merino tops color block fashion and then started sprinkling on bits of silk fabrics ( most of my silk fabric is harvested from Thrift shop finds) and yarn scraps followed by silk fibers.

After wetting out the fibers, i was ready to ROLL!!! And Roll and Roll and Roll and ROLL and ROLL I did!!  And then I rolled some more!  Next came the throwing to shock the fibers into place.

Thanks Ro, For the inspiration!!!

Here is a close up of a portion of the felted collage.  Not a single needle was used to create this project.  Now what to do with it???????  I have a plan up my sleeve and I will share it with you very soon!!

It has Been Way to long since my last post!!!!

My fabric/paper birds at the FCCA Members Gallery holiday Show

Where has the time gone??? Thanksgiving was a blur with lots of pie's and yeast rolls flying in and out of the oven, a 12 Days of Christmas Swap gathered in and swapped out- with no errant left over packages- that is my biggest worry when doing a swap- and some very nice family time thrown in!! PHEW!!!!

So what has been up artistically???????????????????? Well, LOTS, to put it mildly!!!

A group of very wonderful volunteers helped me bedeck the Members Gallery at FCCA for our Annual Holiday Gift Sale that opens this Friday night at the Fredericksburg First Friday Event. We hung close to two hundred small works salon style,

in our small space and filled out the room with some lovely ornaments and jewelry, free form crochet scarves and felted neck wear.
The Holiday Members Gallery Show opened on Friday evening to rave reviews and quite a few sales!! Keep your fingers crossed that we will have many more sales this year. Something new that we are doing for this show is asking each member who submits work to this show to spend two hours over the month serving as a docent. This way when customers and show viewers come to visit, they are met by a friendly super knowledgeable person to assist them and answer any questions. I am sure that this will only help generate more sales as people really enjoy talking to artists about their work.

Some of my Resin coated fabric/paper jewelry for sale at the show.The Saturday following Thanksgiving I hosted an art play day for several good friends. We were going to experiment with a technique that friend Karen Scudder and I have been following on Ro Bruhn's blog, here and here. Karen and I have been trying to carve out time to play since last February and we finally found it, last Saturday. Friends Leslie Brier and Terry Pritzel joined us for a day of Painting Around!

Basically we took our 4 large stretched canvases put them all on one table pushed up tight one against the other and began to paint the canvases in circles as we circled around the canvases. it was sort of musical chairs with paints only using canvases rather than chairs. It was a blast and so very free and exciting. If we started a circle on one egde of a canvas we completed that circle on the canvas that was next to the first. If we liked a certain pattern or the way two colors looked when placed next to each other on one canvas we did the same on another canvas.
Very early in the paint around process.

Leslie and Karen working away!

The canvases after we each worked individually on our own pieces. We each plan to add many more touches to each of our pieces before we will consider them finished.

Leslie Brier with her great piece.

Terry Pitzel with her wonderful piece!

Karen Scudder and her fabulous work!

And a scowling moi with my piece. Not sure why such a serious face- I WAS having a great time- tired I guess! Since this picture was taken I have not had as much time as I would like to go back and add details in black and white paint. Soon I will have the time, I hope!!!

We were all channeling our inspiration form the awesome Ro Bruhn. Take a few moments to hop by her blog for a visit as there is no end to her enthusiasm and fabulous work. She lives in Australia but has a wonderfully infectious personality that makes me feel that we have met several times- SOMEDAY!! she will also be teaching in 2012 at the Upcoming Art IS YOU Australia Retreats!!!