Thursday 10 June 2010

Experimenting

I'd been meaning to try and work out some ideas I'd had for a while, when this piece by viltalakim inspired me to start experimenting. Using strips of plastic from supermarket carrier-bags as resists, I made this piece of felt by sandwiching the resists between layers of felt and then cutting the top two layers and peeling back to reveal the felt underneath :


I used other fibres such as silk top, silk noil, soya fibre and bamboo on the layers that would show, to get the look I wanted.
Once I'd tried simple wavy cuts, I wanted to try out a few different ones. On this piece, the cuts are (from top to bottom) vertical cuts; diagonal cuts (the felt 'flaps' were then lifted up); thin slices cut off horizontally and the holes stretched; a wavy cut; a mixture of horizontal and vertical and lastly zigzags.


This burgundy piece was made the same way as the first one, but I used a resist on the back aswell, to create a channel for a dowel or similar for hanging.


It took me a while to get round to it, but a couple of days ago I used what I'd learned to make this felt danglie:


It took about 3 hours to lay out the wool tops, silk and plastic strips, and felt it. Then after a bit of a rest, the cutting and shaping took about another hour. Seemed like I'd never finish, but I'm pleased with the results

15 comments:

  1. Wow ... love this post. Thank you for the inspiring ideas.

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  2. Your experimenting is really inspiring! Thanks for sharing this!

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  3. You do such beautiful work - and your colors are just gorgeous!

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  4. Beautiful works and very interesting experiment.

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  5. Wow Zed these are all so gorgeous, i absolutely love the lantern i think its Brilliant :))

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  6. Interesting experiment! I did this on the scarf.

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  7. Thanks for all the nice comments everyone :)

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  8. I love your experiments!!
    Silvia

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  9. These are wonderful 'riffs' on Kim's piece!!

    ...you are giving ME ideas, now!! :)

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  10. Beautiful ideas, I love them.
    grt, Helmi

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  11. I wonder if you cut a small hole in it and had it undercover, could be used for a nest by a bird!

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  12. I've thought about trying something like this to make a kind of nesting place for birds, maybe not so fancy though :)

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