This spring has been a flurry of activity for me, with weddings, out of
town guests, other social engagements, and travel. Keeping up with this
blog had to take a back seat for a bit, as well as larger felting
projects. So, I've used the few spare moments of creative time here and
there recently to study more felting techniques and to experiment with
wet felting different kinds of wool in different ways.
It's all
been very simple, basic beginner stuff, but it's refreshing and
liberating to experiment freely with no hopes or expectations regarding
the outcome.
Many of the "sculptural tapestries" I've done have
started with simple wet felted backgrounds, but those take forever.
For that reason, and for the joy of creative challenge, I'm interested
in creating images solely through wet felting. Most of the felt art
that I'm seeing lately that blows my mind is in the world of wet
felting, rather than needle felting, and it's left me inspired to see if
I can learn and adapt techniques to my own little world inspired by
primitivism, pop culture,surrealism and esoterica.
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| Ankh |
It's not the aim of this post to break down the experiments by wool type
and result. Most of these experiments were "test patches," making
simple little images with different kinds of wool I had around the
house. Fine, merino wool has the most pleasing to work with, and
shrinks a LOT. Different percentages of shrinkage was an issue,
especially when combining different kinds of wool in the layering
process.
The thing I enjoyed most was working on "spider web"
felting, which as you would guess, is the process of creating thin,
web-like felt. Also, created some spider-web felt in conjunction with
chunky, hand spun yarn as part of the structure. It seems like there is
a much creative potential for the future with that technique.
I'm not feeling overly wordy today, so. . . just some pictures of my favorite "test patches."
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| Used clothes pins during drying to "sculpt" facial features |
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| Abstract test patch, merino |
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| Eye of Horus, unknown wool (created poor quality felt.) |
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| Spider-web felt mini-hanging, with hand spun yarn |
This spring has been a flurry of activity for me, with weddings, out of
town guests, other social engagements, and travel. Keeping up with this
blog had to take a back seat for a bit, as well as larger felting
projects. So, I've used the few spare moments of creative time here and
there recently to study more felting techniques and to experiment with
wet felting different kinds of wool in different ways. 
