▼
Thursday 28 July 2011
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.
Thanks! Hopefully I'll be able to dig up a brooch back in my stash soon so I can make it into a finished piece of jewellery too.
ReplyDelete