BLOG 210

I had another couple of felting sessions this week. I am motoring now, producing samples and really enjoying the learning process. I found some light, medium and dark bags of felting wool tops on line and now have enough to really play with the technique.

                                            Ready

                                      Steady

                                             Go

                                       Layer 2

                                          Layer 3

                                     Pansies

                                       Felting

                                        Felted

                                Pansies stitched

                              Sunflowers fibres

                              Sunflowers felted

                            Sunflowers stitched

                 Needle felted for comparison

And what have I learned?

I have always enjoyed colour so I think I want to try to be quite ‘painterly’ with the fibres.

The wet felting technique can be messy so needle felting by machine has its attractions (apart from the holes left by the needles). I did a comparison with the sunflower panel with wet felting and machine needle felting. What I found was that I had more control over the fibres when working by machine.

I am not sure at this stage whether the machine stitched detail enhances the finished felt. Hand needle felting the details to flower centres definitely helped the finished look.

Now this is all great fun for me but my daughters brought me to an abrupt halt by saying ‘But what are you going to do with them all?’ And here we have the age old dilemma for the one who is doing the creating. During my entire quilting career I have sewn with a purpose; things were made as samples for workshops, or for competition quilts to promote myself or as innovative ideas for books and the like. So playing for playing’s sake is hard for me and this question has made me ask myself whether I should frame them or make things from them to sell. Then common sense clicks in and I realise that no one would particularly want to buy them at this stage any more than I am confident enough to sell them. So I am going to make for making’s sake because I can’t put a price on my own enjoyment!

I have just returned from the Festival of Quilts at the NEC. Our group always has a wonderful couple of days together and this year, as ‘Les Q-ers’, was no exception. Perhaps you can make out from the picture below that our theme entitled ‘Q 4 Quilters’ was about queueing. Our characters are going to the show and from the show and we attempted to capture the difference between the beginning of the day and the end of the day. And that comparison aspect was the whole point of the quilt, so imagine our horror on arrival when we saw that the quilts were hung back to back. This made no sense at all and was contrary to our instructions. It took us 2 days and very heated discussions with the organisers to get it altered for day 3 of the show. That said, we did receive a ‘Highly Commended’ for our efforts and we were thrilled about that.

                                                                                         Q 4 Quilters