Felt Bookcovers

I've made a few new felt book covers, recently. First, I made a large seascape in felt:

Then I made it into an A5 bookcover. This is the front:

And the back:

I had a look through my already made felt pieces and found one from a Felting and Fiber Studio challenge which I thought would make a nice A6 cover, so I cut that out:

There's quite a lot of viscose on the orangey yellow part so it has a nice sheen. This is the front:

Not quite so obvious in the photos is the texture near the bottom with silk noil and some cotton fibres. I think I used some dyed cotton nepps too. This is the back:

I'd been making this next notebook cover since January! I had a big clear up and tidied my offcuts, which led to planning the cover. I then sewed some of it in March, and finally finished it last week. Either can be the front or back, so this is side 1:

And side 2:

I used some hand dyed muslin for a backing/lining:

This is how it looks with the front and back opened out:

I still have my offcuts out and plan to make some collage shoulder bags, next.

Fauvism Challenge

Over on The Felting and Fiber Studio we have Quarterly Challenges. The First Quarter Challenge was from Ruth, it was a Fauvism Challenge. I was late getting mine done, and if you want to see some of the other brilliant entries, you can do here. I kept changing my mind about what I wanted to do, I thought I had finally made my mind up, but then looked at other entries and remembered a felt picture I made from a photo my sister took. You might remember it: http://feltbyzed.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/felt-picture.html

I took the original photo (without permission!) and altered the colours in Photoshop:

I'd had in my head that Fauvism was really bright, but the more I looked, the more I saw muted colours, unsaturated shades. There's one particular jade green that I started to see everywhere! I simplified the picture to get the colour bands:

And added some 'accented edges':

Then I blended the last one and first one together:

A lot of the Fauvist paintings had roughly blended brush strokes and patchy areas so I blended some colours for each band to try to get that effect:

I don't know which photo shows it better:

Then I added embellishment fibres for more effect, this is some Kapok on the pink, there's a bit of silk on the blue, trilobal nylon on the orange, and nylon staple on the blue:

 I don't know why I did that second band blue, I can see it's green on the photo, I clearly wrote 'green' on my template, and somehow chose blue! Maybe I tilted my laptop screen back too far (good excuse!) I did realise before felting and changed it:

The other embellishments and fibres I added are: some dark blue wool and light blue nylon for trees at the top; some green wool and red nylon for trees between the top orange row and blue one underneath it; green and yellow viscose staple on the green layer and some dark blue nylon for a hedge. The track lines are wool; I used viscose and nylon on the lower orangey band, and the blue/purple band at the bottom has dyed cotton nepps and nylon staple fibre added. This angle might show them a bit better:

I was quite disapointed when I looked at it, still wet, pegged on the washing line to dry, it looked so dull and flat:

It looked a lot better when it was dry, but I put lots of detail in the original one, so it still looks dull in comparison. If I ever get brave enough, I'll try some free motion stitching on it!