Friday, January 29, 2010

Needle felted purse


Now here is a wonderful original purse . . . you won't find another walking down the street towards you!

There are a variety of fibres needle felted onto a base of cotton batting and muslin . . . fabrics are felted first and then yarns, roving, silk rods, silk fibres, tussah, mohair curls,and ribbons are felted on top . . . then some hand embroidery and beading have been added to embellish it some more. Click on the photo to see more detail.

The purse is lined with a piece of hand-painted cotton that has been textured with metallic paint . . . and the strap is hand spun yarn by a local fibre artist friend who used thin strips of recycled silk along with the other fibres to create this unusual yarn that is perfect for this bag.

It is all a veritable feast for the senses and will be a source of much discussion as a sample when I take it to show the needle felting class I am teaching soon.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Tree A


What an original title for this work "Tree A" . . . but I guess that is what it will be called until I come up with something more creative. This is a wall hanging that I worked on this past week and it has been an experiment in using techniques that I have worked with in the past incorporated into a quilt that came to be as a result of some serendipitous trees that appeared during the drying process of a piece of fabric that I painted. I wanted to bring the trees out by using this piece of the fabric in a landscape . . . but I wanted it to be a little less "realistic" than the last few landscapes I have done.

The result is this 17" x 23" art quilt. All the fabrics are hand-painted or hand-dyed by me and the foreground is constructed of cheesecloth, organza and other fibres that I needle felted by hand before applying it to the surface. There is even a bit of white cheesecloth "foam" around some of the rocks in the river.

You can click on the photo to see more of the detail. I'd be interested to know what you think.