A little bit of felting

In between the times spent cuddling a kitten, I have been managing to make a few bits of felt. I'd planned to spend January trying to finish working on my own way to make larger flowers. I'd made one as a corsage in the autumn and several people had asked if they could have one, but I was never fully happy with it, it always takes me a few goes plus tweaks here and there, and I ran out of time to experiment. I made this one earlier in the week, a bit smaller than my original. I anchored the stamens in a different way, next time I'll make them a bit finer but I'm nearly happy with the design. So I'm looking forward to being able to have a proper play with colour combinations soon, I've got lots of different silk fibres to try.

I also managed a small bowl, usually I've done these in much more vivid colours but I'd got some brown Rowan wool in the sale and thought I'd go for much more muted tones. I wasn't quite expecting the design to disappear as much as it did though - it's really blended in, but there's always a place for subtlety! One of the magical things about felt is the slight (or sometimes great if you're experimenting) unpredictability of the final blending of the fibres.

You can see the brown fibres being folded over onto the inner layer of un-dyed ones:and the spiral design on the outer layer before it all blended together! Some feltmakers do this whole process the other way round, laying the decoration next to the template and making the first layers what will be the outside and the final layers what will be the inside, and turning the whole thing inside-out at the end.

These two pics were taken in daylight and the finished one in artificial light - despite white-balancing I still haven't worked out how to get the colours to look exactly the same!