Felted Tree _ Day 6

Well here I go.
About  9 sq inches.

I know this will take several days so, after this, I'll wait till it's finished to post about this piece again.

Felted Tree - Day 5

Well this has certainly been a journey.
I'm not entirely happy with this but I've decided I have finished with the actually felting.
What next?
I'm going to try to do nothing more today and start again tomorrow with a fresh perspective. Time for the stitching. ( I woke from a dream today where I had spent a month beading the whole thing??!! )

Photographing it still remains a problem. It always appears darker than it is.

The string is the proposed horizon line.

Felted Tree - Day 4

It was time to start lifting the colour in this piece.

Finding roving for needle felting is not always the easiest thing. There are several weaving centres in our area but all are at least a half day's drive. It was time for the McGyver treatment again.

Make your own roving by untwisting any yarn.
Rather than spend a lot of money on carding boards and brushes, I bought two inexpensive Dog Brushes. (I think these came from TSC but they are found in a lot of places.)

Cutting the yarns into 2 to 3 inch pieces works best for this size brush, and in less than a minute you have a nice bit of "roving" to work with.

Some sections of this are looking really good. This is an activity that for me, works best standing on my feet. So I take lots of breaks.

The addition of lime green really adds some life.

Felted Tree - Day 3

We had a great time at our monthly Fibre Arts meeting last night. We were supposed to be needle felting figures or animals, some 3 dimensional thing. As the person who suggested the event wasn't there, no chose to do that! Most did some felting but it was all flat felting, as I'm doing. I think it was thinking about the up coming meeting that steered me to trying the technique for this piece.

I even brought an inspirational image of figure felting, from the Internet. After we all stopped laughing, they all declined! (Though everyone loved his "jockeys")

Back to less stimulating trees......

I started today "filling" the foliage. Colour blocking only. I switched to hand needling to get more control. (Only stubbed myself once.)
I'm working with 4 shades of green. One of them has threads of turquoise through it, which, while effective needs to be used sparingly.

There is probably another session for this part and then I haven't really decided what comes next.

2:00 PM - Well I KNEW I would monkey mind this one incessantly so I tried a few ideas. I couldn't envision beading something this large, maybe a few, but for the background finishing I think my meandering leaves will work. They are about 5mm in size. Any smaller and they get swallowed by the fibre.

Felted Tree - Day 2

There is a learning curve to using the felting machine. I now know how to change out broken needles. Actually I didn't bother to replace it. Eleven out of twelve is still a usable machine.

I also discovered, happily, I could "felt" the green material onto the backing. It is possible to run the netting through the machine and have it release very easily. It can be reused several times to tame a piece of roving but then it finally does shred.

rear view

As I looked at this blank tree last night I realized I really liked the fabric choice. With a little more care and fussy cutting it could have stood alone, in keeping with the original photo. But I decided to forge ahead. I can always do a another one later.

And promptly forgot my "Golden Rule". Start with the background colours. What I foolishly did was start with some foreground branches and played with a few different colours and fabric. I was not happy.

Then a little bird whispered "forget that part and fill the rest of the crown....with background colour".  I spent the rest of the day doing so. The results were more in keeping with my final vision.

Still a long way to go and I suspect that most of the additional felting will be needle felting, for  both precision and scale.