Felt United 2011

I finished my piece for Felt United...sort of. I still need to tweak the hanging system. I really don't like the fussy finishing work of getting a piece ready to display. If I had loads of money I would turn the pieces over to someone else to figure that part out. In fact, one of the things I didn't like about working with pastels was trying to get the pieces matted and framed without getting the pastel dust everywhere or smudging the image. I am just not careful/patient enough. That is not a good reason to give up on using a medium. Thankfully not all my felt pieces are hard to prepare for display.

Here are the photos I submitted to Felt United. I wound up pinning the piece to a board to take these shots.

I spent Felt United day, Oct. 1st 2011, at my friend Joei's house having a felt-a-thon. I was supposed to teach my Felted Landscape class at the West Hartford Art League that weekend but it got canceled...again. (Since it looked like only 1 of 8 workshops was actually going to run there I am trying not to take it personally. Happily the workshop I am teaching at the end of the month at Halcyon Yarn in Bath, Maine is full.)  I had spent so much time on my piece for Felt United, especially doing the stitching, that all I wanted do at Joei's was to play felt. I do like stitching but my finger tips were sore; and I like felting more. I had bought a lot of new fabrics at JoAnn's (damn those clearance sales!) that I wanted to sample, but first I wanted to use up all the left over scraps from my leaves. I don't usually use red so I figured I would just take the cut pieces, throw them on some wool and felt it like a real abstract. Here is the crazy layout.

As I felted it the black base fibers came up though the red (as I hoped it would) and toned down everything nicely. So nice that I decided to shape it into a little clutch that I just need to stitch on the sides and add a button.
Uh-oh...more stitching!

So on to my fabric sampling...first I tried this embroidered netting.

Then I did these samples which may get made into cuffs...yep, more to stitch.

 Lastly I sampled several different fabrics in one piece.

And of course Joei and I did a lot of talking, laughing, eating, and drinking.

It was a great way to celebrate Felt United.