Red poppy (WIP)

I haven't blogged in a few days now. Mostly it's because I haven't been that much online (which is also the reason I still have unanswered e-mails in my inbox and haven't been active at all on forums lately). I do have a lot of flower photos I want to show, but none of the pics are edited yet -- and I still have pics from May that I wanted to blog about but never got around to *sigh* -- so in the meanwhile you'll have to do with this little felted poppy.

I didn't originally intend to make a poppy. It all started when I saw a multi-coloured hand-felted piece of, well, felt in a craft magazine. I thought a melange cloth like that could make an interesting background for embroidery. A hazy landscape, perhaps, or a green meadow to fill with flowers. Perhaps I should make a few felts myself, I thought, using different coloured rovings. Not that I've really wetfelted anything before (and no more skilled when it comes to needle felting).

I think it was my lack of experience that made me think "what if I don't felt the whole thing, but just add wool to a piece of ready-made felt?" That would be easier, just needle felting on a finished surface. I have some red wool I bought at a sale (part of a christmas ornament kit, I believe) and I have scraps of felt. First I tried just to attach the wool to a piece of heavy synthetic hobby felt, which was at most a partial success, but then I tried the Nepalese felt scraps, 100 % fair trade wool, instead. Worked much better.

This is my second go at needlefelting so I think I can be reasonably pleased with the result. It was just a "blob" to begin with, but then the shape began to remind me of a flower so I kept working with that in mind and added a small piece of the black felt in the middle as stamen. And so my poppy was born. It'll probably become a brooch, I think. A relatively small brooch as the flower is approx. 3 cm wide. Not sure what to back it with (needs to be more rigid that it is right now) or how I want to edge it, but it should probably be kept clean and simple to really put the focus on the dramatic colours and the shape of the poppy.

I also made this 12 mm heart. My intention was to make a five-petal flower, but when I added the second petal, it was clear that it wanted to become a heart. A slightly lopsided heart.

So that's one of the things I've been working on lately. I keep having ideas, but it's frustrating not to be able to test them all as I lack supplies and it's likewise frustrating that sometimes the ideas are just "loose ends" that I don't seem to be able to work into projects and finished pieces of jewellery. But at the same time it beats having no ideas at all.