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. ;)