Northeast Fiberarts Center felting challenge

It is a rainy, windy day so I am going to catch up on my blog posts. This is also to shamelessly solicit votes for the piece I created for this challenge.
The Northeast Fiberarts Center offered a felting challenge in March. For a nominal fee we were sent a nice packet of fibers with the instructions that we had to use some of all of the fibers in our felt. We were allowed to add one thing of our choice to make the piece. Here is a photo of the packet of fibers I received. (It was a lot of fiber for the fee!)

 The packet had "4 ounces of white Vermont merino... 4 ounces of red/orange/purple Vermont Swirl (wool with a bit of silk), a piece of gold pre/partial felt, some turquoise reeled silk waterfall, a hunk of multi-colored (but mainly pink) pulled silk, some blue/turquoise silk mawattas/hankies...and several yards of loopy orange/purple/black , funky, but feltable boucle yarn".
I decided that the first thing to do was to sample how all of the fibers would felt so I made a small sample.

Front and back.

I was stumped at first. These were pretty close to the same colors that I had just challenged myself with doing an image of a tulip. I don't often work with warm colors; blues and greens are my favorite colors. I thought about doing a kind of desert scene. I finally asked myself what I would call the predominant color in the sample and the word 'coral' popped into my head. I decided I could do a kind of funky coral reef scene if I added some blue wool for the color of the water. So I chose a turquoise blue short fiber merino for my one added thing.
I am not used to working with so limited a color palette so I decided that I could increase the range of hues by separating some of the variegated fibers. I took out bits of grey and black from the loopy yarn, separated out the stripes in the wool top, and even picked out different bits of color from the pulled silk.

Here is the variegated roving separated .

Since I have been playing with having 3D objects in my pictorial felts I this would be the perfect piece to have objects in high relief in the foreground. I had been wanting to try one of  Marjolaine Dalinga's technique for creating interesting shapes. This is what I ended up with. 

I decided that I really needed some green to make sea grass type stuff so I decided that I could card the yellow fibers from the prefelt with the turquoise short fiber merino. It worked but mixing those super short fibers was the real challenge. Here is a close up of the sea grass.

I did not take any other process photos so here is the finished piece. 

So, now go to this page and check out the other pieces that were submitted and if you are inclined to vote for mine it would be very much appreciated. ;)

First landscape class in my home.

     I am really behind on my blog posts so I am going to try to write just a little bit about one subject at a time and try to write several over the next couple of days.
     First, I want to show off the work that the students did in the class I taught here. I had originally said that the class minimum had to be 4 students but when only three signed up I decided to do the class anyway as a trial run on teaching in my space. One of my students was coming to Connecticut from California. It made me feel really good to know that someone was willing to travel all that distance to take a class with me! Unfortunately she lives right where the Camarillo Springs fire wildfire started. The fire was still raging at that point so she had to cancel her trip. I can't imagine how frightening that situation must be. So I was down to two students but decided to hold the class anyway since money scarce and is very necessary if I want to pay for the workshops I signed up for, and I was already set up.

Here you can part of the set up, with examples of  my landscapes and SOME of the various fibers I use.

     Barb and Lisa got to have an almost private lesson and I was able to work on a landscape as well. I asked them if they minded if I did some busy work felting while they were working and they said it would be better if I worked on my own landscape so they could see how I did it. I do demos when I teach but that is just to show different techniques I use. I could see how it was helpful for them to be able to see the entire process.
     One of the things that I talk about in my art lesson at the beginning of class is the importance of value in the 'painting' and how to see it. Students will often use a wide range of colors but a limited range of values. The wet felting process tends to lessen the value range further. I have found that my camera is a great tool for showing values. Here is a photo of one of my 'palettes'  in color and in greyscale

Here is a photo of Barb's layout first in color, then in greyscale.

I suggested that adding some real darks would make the image more interesting and would be more indicative of a clear sunny day. Here is the layout a little later in the afternoon.

And here is her layout just before wet felting it.

Lisa's piece had a greater value range from the start. She had a bit of an advantage in the her reference photo had more contrast to start with.

One of the tricks of teaching landscape is to learn how a student approaches things and how to guide them to achieve the look they want. One thing that is difficult for anyone to depict is something random. We tend to make patterns, and while there is a lot of patterning in nature there is also a lot of variation. I find that people who tend to be orderly in their lives have more of a tendency to make all the lines and masses of a piece very similar in size and weight. I encouraged Lisa to try to put a bit more variation in her piece.

Here is Lisa's piece just before wetting.

Here is Lisa's piece after wet felting. I don't seem to have a photo of Barb's piece at this stage.

Here are the pieces at the end of the second day during which they developed the pieces by needle felting.

They were both very happy with the class and their pieces. I thought they both came out lovely and really had such a nice relaxed time teaching.  Smaller classes are so much easier. I also learned that I would not really want to do more than 4 students in my current space as it is set up now.

Here is my piece after wet felting. It is based on one of the photos that Barb brought and gave me permission to use. It is of Newfound Lake in New Hampshire. 

I kind of liked the flat undeveloped look of it at this stage. It reminded me of a very loose pastel done with a lot of scumbling. However I used it as a demo piece for the needle felting techniques so in the end it totally lost that effect....but it has a bit better value range. ;)

Back to landscapes

I don't remember now what drove me to make a new landscape. But whatever the reason it happened at a good time. I had just been asked about teaching a landscape class here and was really not sure how I was going to answer. I was not enthusiastic about the idea of teaching the class again. But while I was working on this new landscape I realized that part of the problem was that it had been so long since I had made a landscape using the techniques that I teach. While I was laying out the fibers I found myself thinking of ways to explain the hows and whys of what I was doing so a student could understand. I started to get excited again about being able to share my knowledge and watching students when they get that "aha" moment.
So I have scheduled a class for May 4th and 5th. If anyone is interested in taking this class please email me at dchristianart@gmail.com for details.
Here is the landscape that I was working on.

It is another piece that I don't consider finished but I am getting to be OK with that. If I can get out of a piece what I wanted to feel, or learn, or express, does it matter if I take it as far as I feel it could go ; especially when there are so many more ideas to try?
And I have been trying quite a few new things. I wanted to participate in the "Sister Mississippi Textile Fiber Arts Project" and made a piece that is inspired by the colors of water. (Use the link above for more information about this project and the water walk.) Making images of water is not new for me. On my Facebook page  I created a photo album of just pieces that were inspired by or contained images of water and found I had 34 pieces to show. For the Mississippi piece I experimented with embeding some cording that we have here from when my mother did macrame. I am really pleased with all the textures in the piece.

 

I also did some new-to-me dyeing using ice and snow. I got some wonderful results.

The center of that piece had this image of a butterfly in it.

I had a piece of silk yardage that I dyed at the same time as the green scarf above. I decided to use it as the trial to see how the pattern felts up. I also wanted to see if the dye stayed put....it didn't...but I still like the piece of felt. I will need to research more about how to set the dyes. Doing this piece I was thinking that I should change my business name to 'Felt Impatient' because I rushed through much of it and as a result it is not a nice even piece of nuno felt. Taking my time might have helped when I was reading the instructions about this type of dyeing too!

The other bit of felting I did was the result of cleaning up the 'studio' for the Easter holiday meal. I had a bunch of silks out and while I was sorting the scraps into colors I decided that some of the bits were too small to keep. But instead of throwing them away I decided to throw them on a pile of wool and felt them in. The result was a piece like the one I sent to the Sister Mississippi project.

Sometimes it is fun just to experiment with colors and textures without aiming to make anything in particular.

Spring-ing

It is that time of year when things start revving up, an awakening, not just in the external world but in my mind as well. My thoughts jump from one thing to the next with lightening speed, and each new idea or task MUST be acted on NOW!! The creative thoughts can be like a bombardment of the brain. I love the feeling of coming alive again and beginning to have some energy and desire to take things on. However, I do not enjoy the rapid cycling of mood, the turn from joy to despair can happen in an instant that comes along with it. It is the time for me to be on the look out for the signs that a real mania may be taking root. The tricky thing with mania is that it feels so good and energetic that, like taking a drug that you intellectually know it is dangerous and bad for you, the allure is really strong.
 
So far the desire to clean and organize has been the strongest and I have been managing to keep it real as far as not starting too many projects. One of those things has been a sudden need to get the old family photos scanned and put into boxes according to generations/eras. I am able to find some reasoning to why I feel the need to do this now. One reason is that Dad has been looking for an old photo of an ancestor for a relative that is doing research into family genealogy. This relative has a photo copy of the picture from my mother that she made long ago. We are not even sure that the photo is here. The other reason is that I finally hooked my scanner up to my laptop. One of the good things about this side of the bipolar spectrum is that I tend to tackle those things that have been on the 'someday' list for years. So not only have I been organizing and scanning these types of photos...

(Little me with my big sisters circa bbb. (before baby brother))

 My grandmother, great grandmother, and great great grandmother and family

 My dad with his elf ears

 My mom (the phrase at the top is part of a family story)

 Yours truly in first grade...I think

And some unknown person in a fading photo that HAD to be scanned before it totally disappeared!
And if I am preserving photos I MUST finally deal with the photos that were 'rescued' from a fire in the early 1980's that burned our ancestral farm.

And since the weather is getting a bit nicer and we have more daylight hours I am spending a lot more time outdoors. Pruning the fruit trees...

 ...building more of my stick fence with those prunings...

and guarding the chickens since we had another attack by the hawk. Of course it killed my favorite chicken of all time, my Silkie, Grumpykins. Here she is as a day old peep, showing why my daughter gave her that name.

She was one of the two moms and the other mother hen and the chicks would not go to bed that night. They were looking for her and even when I scooted them into the coop they checked each nest just in case she was there. That made me cry. I still miss her. 

 But I did not get chickens just to keep them locked in a cage so I do what I can to protect them and just have to take these loses as part of the circle of life. We all have to eat. Thankfully I scared the hawk off before it got a bite of its meal. I hope it will go back to looking for dinner elsewhere so both the chickens and I relax a bit when they are out and about. Thankfully I have such a good rooster in Fred...

he spots that hawk and warns his girls with three distinct noises. One that means 'keep your eyes on the skies girls', one that means 'run for your lives', and another that means 'hide and be quiet'. He often spies the hawk and the only way I can find it in the sky is by looking where he is looking. Sadly, the two mommas and chicks had formed their own rooster-less group, and it is possible that Grumpykins died trying to save her chicks, who would have been easier prey.
The little bit of felting that I did do was to work on another illuminated piece. Since the house was still fairly clean from my Felt-Together weekend I invited another friend to come play felting. Chris and I became friends years ago; see this post for the back story. She worked on making a vest and I worked on laying out this...

which may be a candle holder...

or maybe a lampshade...

or maybe it will just stay like this.

And continuing with getting together with friends I also had a wonderful time going to the bulb show at Smith with one of my old class mates, my forever friend Kristen. We met in at an orientation luncheon given for the Adas (aka women who are going to Smith at a nontraditional age) and we have remained friends ever since, even though we may go for a very long time without any contact. Those are forever friends...the kind of people you feel a strong connection with right from the moment you meet that never goes away.
Here she is 'photo bombing' (popping in to someone's photo of something else) something which I have never heard of. In this case her appearance made the photo better.

These beautiful flowers at the bulb show...

inspired me to start this piece using colors that are very unusual for me to work with.

It is still very much a work in progress.  It needs a bit more fulling but I am adding some stitching first. I am not sure where I am going with this or if it will get done or just added to the pile of UFOs. Especially since Spring is springing.

P.S. Talking a lot more than usual esp. quickly is another sign of mania...is the same true of posting on my blog?