BLOG 113

I have come down to earth again now after our surprise Best in Show win at the Festival of Quilts last weekend. I have been told (I’m not interested enough to look for myself) that there have been several unfavourable comments posted about this on various sites. Well, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. As a group, we enjoyed lots of hilarity portraying ourselves at the Quilter’s Games and submitted it for viewers to enjoy the tongue-in-cheek humour of it all. And crowds of viewers did enjoy it; you only had to stand by the quilt for a while to witness the warm response. If some quilters have taken offence and can’t enjoy it for what it was, this reflects on them and not on us. The Best in Show quilt is selected, from all the individual winners, by a group of independent judges and our quilt, which just happened to coincide with the euphoria that followed the Olympics, captured their imagination. The humour is back in quilting and long may it continue!

Now, onto more important things: what have I been up to this week? Well I have had a total change of direction just for the hell of it. With the money I won last year, I bought an embellishing machine.  This is a bit of a misnomer as it gives the impression that it will do fancy embellishing. It doesn’t. All it consists of is a cluster of barbed needles that go up and down so it is in fact only a needle felting machine. Having done precious little with it so far, I decided to invest in a book and lots of different coloured fibres to have a go at ‘painting’ pictures which I can perhaps frame if they are successful.

The book I purchased is called Art in Felt and Stitch by Moy Mackay, published by Search Press. It was her sense of colour that attracted me in the first place and then, on inspection, I was amazed at the detail she was able to get into her pictures. Here is my ‘painting’ palette made up of wool tops, fleece, animal and silk fibres and Angelina fibres and now I am ready to play!

 

                                           Colour palette

The author creates her pictures by wet felting and fine-tunes with needle felting. Rather than create cloth in this way, I chose just to needle felt with my machine onto an open-weave background fabric. When learning a new creative process like this, the easiest thing to do is to shadow the author. She offers advice as an expert in the technique, she illustrates the step-by-step method and hopefully has ironed out all the problems that might arise.

Here is my first attempt to create one of her pictures.

 

 

                               Rough drawing

 

 

                                         Sky

 

 

                                        Hills

 

                                             Foreground

 

 

 

                                    Adding colour

 

 

                                  Adding shadow

 

Viewed in a frame

 

 

                                 Reverse side

 I need to add more specific detail with a single felting needle and machine embroidery. I have certainly enjoyed the process thus far and even had a go at another two of her pictures.

 

 

                                         Play station!