Wildflower Meadows in Felt and Stitch

Wildflowers are a favourite theme for me when I am needle felting. The felting seems to lend itself to gentle landscapes and adding hand stitched flowers and foliage seems to make them come alive.

This is the first time that I have stitched the felted landscape to a fabric background and then continued the stitching into that background.

The piece was then wrapped and stapled to a stretched canvas for hanging.

Needle Felted Book Cover

Needle felting is so much fun and it creates rather ethereal looks  . . .  just what I love!

I have been working on a book cover that will protect a Bible. The person for whom the book cover is a gift was very taken with my felted flower gardens and asked if I could create one for her Bible. We talked about some of the things that would make this particularly special for her and this is the beginning of the piece . . .

Needle felting distorts the shape of the base during the felting process, so there is always extra felt that will be trimmed back from the edges before the piece is finished.  I have chosen a couple of pieces of my hand dyed and hand painted fabric (in the top corner of this photo) that I will use for the lining and the binding.

I first needle felted the wool rovings that I chose for the sky and field to the base fabric and then started adding the background flowers before moving to the foreground and creating larger, more detailed flowers. I also felted some hand dyed cheesecloth into the foreground to give some added texture.

After all the felting was done, I used some free-motion machine stitching to create flowing lines in the sky and to accentuate some of the flower shapes as well as grasses and leaves. This helps strengthen the felted piece as well as adding details.

The final step was to add some hand embroidery stitches ... some bright yellow dandelions, delightful red strawberries, and even a couple of butterflies and one little ant :)  I added a piece of lightweight fusible interfacing to the back of the felt in order to stabilize it before constructing the cover. Having the fusible interfacing on the back would help keep the embroidery stitches in place if I happened to snip one when I was squaring up the felted piece.

The cover is finished now and you can see in the detail photo above, the way that I bound the edges before hand stitching the cover right onto the Bible. I wanted the cover to fit very tight and this one was just perfect :)

I added some page markers with pretty glass beads in the shape of leaves. My label is sewn into the inside of the binding so it is not visible when the book is opened.

Rhapsody in Blue

 The silk fibres in this silk fusion were hand dyed using kool-aid . . . the blue and purple took beautifully and have resulted in a smooth harmony.  The silk fusion was stitched to a background of black dupioni silk and backed with black quilt batting.  I used free motion machine stitching, hand embroidery, and beading to accentuate portions of the silk fusion and then hand-couched some rich turquoise hand spun yarn to the surface.  The piece was then mounted on a stretched artist's canvas.

On the long dangling ends of the yarn I have added some fibre art beads that I created by hand painting tyvek from some old envelopes and then heat distressing it along with some synthetic organza and tulle in the same turquoise and purple colours.  Additional seed beads and larger beads have been added for more interest. The bead dangles are asymmetrical ... and hang several inches below the bottom of the canvas.

This piece has a picture hanging wire on the back so it hangs from a nail on your wall just like any painting. This piece measures 20" x 16".  It is currently entered in the Shuswap Lake Festival of the Arts and will later be available for sale in my Etsy shop.

PS - On opening night at the Shuswap Lake Festival of the Arts, I found that this piece had received a Juror's Choice Award.