Being Productive

I have been doing quite a bit of felting AND business stuff lately. And that is a good thing as there are several events coming up that I need to make work for. One of those is the Granby Land Trust show that I have been submitting  pieces to the last few years.  I needed/wanted some more reference photos of the area since our work has to have been inspired by a certain place. This year we can do anywhere in the Farmington Valley so I went out to some places in Canton to take photos of the Farmington River. It was a really nice day for me....walking in the woods, sitting by the river watching fish jump, seeing the eagles fly by looking for said fish; and the weather was beautiful. I have a few photos that may work as a reference for a piece...

 My first deadline is for Felt United which is this coming Saturday. I have been working on two pieces. I had two different ideas for this years theme of FIRE and could not decide between them so I decided to try both. I will post better photos later but here is a sneak-peek.

My friend Joei and I finally got together for a weekend. It has been a long time since we saw each other. We both had busy summers; she spent many days in Russia on 'the felting trip of a lifetime' with Rod and Karolina. She really tried to get me to go but I decided that I could not quite swing it. I am jealous after hearing all about her experiences. They stayed with a family out on the steppe near the Altai mountains (yup in Siberia) and slept in traditional yurts. Her talking about eating the sheep's head soup however did not make me jealous. If she ever blogs about it I will put a link in here.
I thought we might felt while we were doing all of catching up but Joei came with an agenda, and this thing....

She is turning into a knitter and spinner! She wanted to ply some yarn that she spun so that she could then dye it. She is already thinking Christmas presents, ugg! And the yarn she was working on is going to become socks for yours truly! So Saturday was dye day, and we did a lot. She over-dyed some roving that was a bit bright for her taste. In the photo the 'before' roving is on the right.

The same color used to over-dye that was used on my sock yarn...I love the color.

While Joei was working on her things I was dyeing some threads and ribbon for stitching on my felts.

And some pieces of silk...

 some roving for my flower classes...

 and a couple of chiffon scarves.

We also played with a technique using markers and alcohol. Joei's came out lovely.

 Mine was not so lovely. 

After Joei left I did do some felting. Not a 'should do' piece; an 'I wanna' piece. I am not sure what caused me to finally try this image that has been on my inspiration board for so long but I really enjoyed doing it.

 I was imagining something along the lines of a tonalist painting but I wanted the colors to be even more subtle. I may play with that image some more but I need to do more dyeing to get the colors I would need. But there are other pieces that must get done first.