Monday 14 April 2014

A Flower a Day: Felted Flower and Leaf

Materials: Merino wool roving, seed beads
Techniques: needle- and wet felting, sewing

I came away from the needle felting workshop at the Pembrokeshire Women's Festival with a sample bag containing some Merino wool roving, a felting needle and a foam block (scouring pad!).  It has been sitting on my kitchen table for the past month, while I wondered what to use it for.  So, today's flower, why not?

This was my first go at free-form needle felting. The heart-shaped leaf went well, but the flower started to pull apart and wouldn't play. I was finding the stabbing pretty intensive, and had to keep stopping and stretching (aching hands and arms from recent practice with fan veils and finger cymbals - not at the same time!).

In the end, I didn't like the way the flower was going, so I finished by wet felting the flower, allowing me to cup it a bit, and stitched the flower to the leaf and brooch back with some embroidery floss, with a few glass beads in the centre. There's no scale in the photo, but this flower and leaf is quite small.

This is my 14th flower already! I'm finding it difficult to blog daily, however, because a combination of my computer and the broadband here makes the going very slow.  I've had a tidy up, ditching a load of temporary files and a couple of unused applications, but it hasn't grabbed back much space. I've been going cross-eyed with boredom at the way my browser arbitrarily decides to stop responding for a minute or two (or more).  So I've decided I'll carry on with a flower a day, but do a weekly post, at least for next week.

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