Been Awhile!

Yikes! A whole month has gone by since my last post (actually , I think it has been two months....arghhh). Well I haven't just been sitting on my laurels. The project I began in my last post is finished as far as the felting goes (still needs to be embellished some more) although it got interrupted midstream and put aside so that I could do a last minute piece for an artwalk I got into (It was called The Ravenswood Pink Walk and was sponsored by House Beautiful Magazine and The Ravenswood Art Walk Organization). House Beautiful Magazine declared that the color for this year is pink. They did their whole March issue around the theme of pink.

Anyway, first up is the project I started at the last post.

The above picture is the culmination of the lace, vanilla & white & oatmeal merino wool, the natural colored blue face leicester wool, cotton doily, silk roving, and locks you saw in the picture of my last post. It took me quite a while to felt and the lace on the sides did not get as tacked down by the wool as I would have liked. The doily is tacked down nicely though (I wonder if it is because the lace trimming is synthetic...usually that is not a problem if the weave is loose enough...hmmm, I will have to ponder on that). Of course I am planning to do some embroidery on it and maybe even a little beading (not sure about the beading). Anyway, the wall hanging is my representation of the tree of life crossed with the idea of the hearth fire or the furnace of our being.


Next up is the wall hanging I made for the Ravenswood Pink Walk.


As I said the theme was pink and I only had two weeks to pull it together. It was February, the theme was pink, and the only thing that was coming to mind was hearts. Hearts...hearts...and more heart! I know it it cliche but my brain was fixated on it, so I tried to think about what hearts are associated with and just went with it. The title of the piece is "Three of Hearts" and it is made of various shades of pink, purple, and red merino wool and merino prefelt, lace inlay, and some violet merino tencel blend wool. It has some embroidery around the pink hearts (I did not do as much embroidery as I wanted because I ran out of time but I may revisit that now that the walk is over). Lastly it has an old time medical illustration that I silkscreened in each of the hearts. I had a lot of fun with it even though I felt a bit rushed. Below is a picture from the reception for the Pink Walk which was held at Architectural Artifacts (if you look close you can see my piece standing on an easel in the back).


Hopefully things will calm down for a while so I can continue to work on the first piece. I hope all of you who are reading this are safe and well.

The remaining Three Flags from LillStreet

Ooops!
Sorry! It looks like I skipped a month in posting (you know what they say about "the best laid plans of mice and men..."). Anyway here are pictures of the remaining three flags during production.

You saw the Earth flag in my last entry and here is the finished Air Flag:


Just like the Earth flag I started with a design marked (with a sharpie) on the backside of a large (taped together) piece of heavy plastic. I used this as the template for laying out my wool. After laying out the first layer of wool I spread out a large sheet of hand-dyed silk on top of that first layer of wool. Then I followed the wool design that showed through the silk and laid out my second layer (so it was a sandwich of wool-silk-wool). Then I wetted and patted the whole thing down and then rolled it up. I rolled it in 15 minute intervals (I hate counting rolls so I go for time). I unrolled in between intervals to check on progress and then rerolled from the opposite direction. I did this for a few hours. After it was done I had the fun of rinsing out the soap. Then I set it to dry (which took a while). By the time I got to the Water flag I was very close to my deadline and didn't have a lot of time for drying. at this point I discovered that my washing machine did indeed have a way to just use the spin cycle. All I can say is I wish I had figured that out with the first three flags. Also, with all three of the remaining flags I corrected my mistake and made sure I dyed the canvas reinforcement to match the predominate color of the flags.
The Air Flag Production:







Here is the finished Fire Flag:

And, here are a couple production pictures (unfortunately by the time I got to the fire flag I was beginning to feel the pressure of my deadline so I took fewer pictures).



When I finally got to the water flag I realized that I did not like my sketch and started trying to come up with other design ideas. I finally hit on the idea of doing a visual representation of the water molecule 'H2O'. Unfortunately I took no production pictures of the water flag, so here it is finished. I will show you both sides since they are slightly different from each other (I was running out of wool in the colors I needed so I made do with what I had).



Finally all was done and all that remained was the clean up.



The flags flew until the end of the first full week of July. They weathered four major storms, several days of high winds, and many days of rain without ripping. I was extremely proud and consider the installation/experiment to be a success (I also got many compliments on my work which is always nice). My flags are down now. I just need to take pictures of how they look after Mother Nature had her turn with them. Then at some point I need to re-work them. Hopefully I will get back to a more regular posting schedule now that my social life has slowed down a bit. I hope you all are having a creative summer (and staying cool)! Ciao.

Semi-New Felt Bag

I meant to put this picture up a while ago. This is a felt bag that I made at the end of August. I had a lot of fun making it. The tassel at the bottom is a mixture of felt yarn and recycled sari-silk ribbon. It is presently hanging at the shop where I sell my scarves.

United Felt: International Day of Felt

Today was the First Annual International Day of Felt. The theme was Yellow through Red a slice of the color wheel. Felters across the world made art made of felt in red, orange, and yellow, and displayed them for the world to see. I made a hanging of felt in those colors and hung it from my porch. It was an interesting experience. I had not previously made anything quite so large before (it is approximately 2.5 feet by 5 feet). I mostly stuck to scarves, shawls, bags, and the occasional sculptural piece in the past. I am usually very hands on with my felt making. I do a lot of patting, rubbing, kneading, scrubbing, and tossing. With such a big piece I had to get into more rolling. Anyway, if you are interested in seeing more information on this day you can go to the United Felt Website at http://www.feltunited.com/ . Below are a couple pictures of my work hanging from my porch. Happy International Day of Felt!

SDA Conference Part 2 - Pictures!

So here are some pictures of the the three things that I finished from the SDA Conference (finally).