felting workshop: day 3

Unfortunately I couldn't be there at the second day, the day that was dedicated to stuffed felt animals. there's a Flickr group for this workshop and I hope soon there will be more photos available from the other participants. I forgot to bring my camera to the third and fourth day :-(, so I can only post photos that I took at home later. If there will be more process images later on on the group I'll link them here.

On the third day we were focusing on surfaces. It was hard to decide what to make, I saw the amazing animals that they had made the previous day and got all confused. finally I decided to make a felt drawing for my children's room. usually I don't like the aesthetics of the anthroposophic felt drawings, so it was a strange decision to take, and it was a hard project to dive into - because it is the material that dictates much of the look.

I was planning on a circular surface with a general whitish wash over a gradient from grey in the sky to brown on the ground, and 3 dimensional bubbles for clouds, and a tree. I soon discovered that a smooth gradient is almost impossible with wool. when laying thin pieces of wool and then felting, it just gets the shape of the wet wool, bunches of hair. finally it became mostly white.

I felted the clouds on half balls in various sizes and later took them out.

Halfway I was not very pleased with the the way the colors didn't work how I wanted, and I felt like I'm getting a regular felt drawing. but then I added the tree. I used pre-felted pieces of brown (for the trunk), greens and light brown (for the leaves) and orange (fruits), which I cut into rounds that communicated with the bally clouds. finally I was more at home in this more graphic precise world. but when I felted the rounds lost their shape and the little orange ones nearly disappeared. It seems that the orange I was using for them was not very cooperative in getting felted. I was using a thin net when felting, to keep the wool in place as much as possible. still, it moved around a bit.

At the end I cut the whole thing to a circle. I quiet like the tension between the organic forms of the felting and the hard scissor cut.