Teeswater and Needle Felting

I know the last post I did about natural wools and fibres featured Viscose as well, but after Ruth's post about Wensleydale on the Felting and Fiber Studio, I thought I'd show a piece that I'd made using 'curly' wool too, though this is Teeswater. I do have some raw Teeswater locks that I bought from Sara's Texture Crafts, but for this I just used commercial Teeswater tops. Tops can be quite deceiving as it isn't always obvious what the characteristics of the wool are, and they often all look quite similar. Until they're felted that is. You don't get quite the same results as using washed and combed or carded wool, but a lot of the features do 'come back' once the wool has been wet. By hand,  I blended some black viscose in with the Teeswater tops for the top layer.

Where the wool and fibre are blended well it has a greyish look to it.

And some parts are a bit more defined.

This is the back of the piece, I just love the look of felt like this :)

Doing a needle felted piece for Marilyn's Monet Challenge got me in the mood for doing some more. So far I've wet felted the backgrounds for 3 pieces, and finished one of them. I played around with a photo I took a few years ago at the beach in Crosby, not far from Liverpool:

Then I needlefelted a piece based on it:

Monet Challenge

I didn't get a chance to do any felting for a while until this week because we had a ridiculous heatwave here. I did manage to make a few batts for the Felting and Fiber Studio's Monet challenge though. After choosing some of my favourite paintings, or ones which I thought I might be able to use as inspiration, I made a simple montage:

I then messed about with it in Photoshop:

Using this for inspiration I made a couple of green batts; a purpley one; a purple and yellow blended one which looks kind of mustardy/mossy, and a mixed blue one. Looking at Monet's style he mostly had a straight/dashy style, but some paintings or certain areas of paintings had a softer swirly style. For the first piece I made using the batts I laid out areas of different colours then added softer wispier swirls of wool and fibres:

I made this piece using the batts too. Neither of these first pieces copy Monet, they are just inspired by the colours.

I wasn't very confident I could do an actual 'copy' of a Monet painting, but I thought I'd have a go of at least doing an impression of a Monet piece :) I chose Morning On The Seine In The Rain.

I was actually quite surprised when this started to dry and it actually looked like something! I don't know if it's because I've stared at the original so much that I can see the similarity and that it's meant to be it, but I'm pleased with how it turned out.

When I was fluffing up the fibres for the swirly piece, I thought I might have a go at needlefelting a piece too. Since I had all the colours out, and had really started to like it, I thought I'd do another based on Morning On The Seine In The Rain. I used a piece of thick commercial Merino prefelt as a base, and blended some texturey wools like Icelandic, carded lambswool and Devon longwool with Merino to get the colours and texture I wanted. I like the way this turned out too :)

If you want to join in the challenge, you can comment on any of our Challenge posts on the Studio site and link to your piece or post it on the forum in the thread we have there: http://feltandfiberstudio.proboards.com/thread/1587/third-quarter-challenge

Mixed Media

This week, I worked on my mixed media pieces for Karen's 3rd Quarter Challenge on the Felting and Fiber Studio Site. The first piece I worked on was the smaller board with lots of folded and creased scrim on. I started by painting the background with some blue shades of acrylic paint.

Then I layered lots of shades of blue and white, then finished with some details of black, white, yellow and red. This is the piece just after I finished, while it was still wet.

And this is it when it is dried. You can't really see the texture in the photo, you might be able to if you click to see it bigger, but I've uploaded it to flickr, so you can see the texture of the scrim and the detail better.

Here's a supermacro of a small part which does show some of the texture:

Often when I work with acrylics, I need to wipe off excess paint, so I keep a spare painting board nearby to wipe the paint on there. It makes a great base for another painting. This isn't really part of the challenge, but I painted it just after the blue piece. It's mostly the same colours, but in different amounts.

 And a supermacro:

 The second piece I worked on was the larger board with 2 layers of scrim. It did turn out the way I'd planned, but didn't look as good as I'd imagined. I painted a light grey in the centre and dark greys around the edges. Then I covered some laser prints of artwork in Golden gel medium and stuck them face down on the surface. When they were dried the next morning, I wet them and carefully rubbed off the backing paper to reveal the prints. I covered in gel medium then painted reds, oranges, yellows and whites around the edges. I don't think I got enough paper off the bottom print. I might carry on working on this, I think it needs something else.

Has anyone else made anything for the challenge? If you post a link, we can add it to the gallery there.