Inspired to stitch - Mr X Stitch

If you do not know about the Mr X Stitch blog you should go over and have a look. 

The blog showcases the unexpected side of needle craft. The images can be shocking, evocative and thought provoking. It is like going to a museum from the comfort of your armchair. If you want a 5 minute tour of what you can expect on the blog, they put together this great video, which I got off the FB page:

I have been honored to have my work showcased on this blog twice now. The first time was a look at the portrait of a cat I made last year in a feature called Too Cute for Tuesday. (Click to enlarge.) He is my sister-in-laws cat, and is, indeed, cute.

Today's Mr X Stitch post is about location, and here is the question I had to answer. 

My question: Tell me about a time the inspiration to create a stitched piece came to you from a sense of place. This could be a physical location in the world or an experience of internal geography. (A city, a bus stop, a room, a journey, a particular experience in the world, etc.) What was the location and what did you make? Tell me about your process.

 I choose to talk about my sunset pieces. To find out for yourself how they were inspired by location click here and find out for yourself.

Two of the three sunsets are available in my Etsy shop, if you are inspired to own one.

Art Challenge Day 6

I started this piece on Saturday, and then we had a rough weekend, so I will bring you Art Challenge Day 6 today. 

I wanted to do something a little different. I was thinking about those just black and white paintings. The ones that look cartoon-eske with black for the shadows and white for everything else. I thought maybe I could do something like that. When I plugged in my request into Google, guess what came up?

A black and white photo of a merino sheep. It had to be fate, I set to work.

Of course I used it as an inspiration.

I am not sure how I feel about this piece. However, trying different techniques and keeping my mind of of the family illness was the point.

What do you think?

Should there be changes? If so, what would you change? OR how would you interpret this sheep?

Art Week - Self-Challenge

Hello everyone.

I have been having some rough times with a family member, of the feline persuasion, who is really ill. It is a roller coaster of emotions. As an effort to make myself think of something else for at least a couple  of hours everyday, I have issued myself a challenge: A finished piece of art everyday.

I have a LOT of un-finished needle felting projects, so today I finished two. Both are tree themed. 

The first one is part of my Sunset series. I wanted to capture that kind of sunset where the pink-orange-yellows seem to alternate with the blue-purple-turquoises. When I was done with this, I felt that there was something missing. So I mixed some natural dark brown fleece with black and created a tree silhouette. This piece still needs finishing, but I am very happy with how it turned out. What do you think? 

The second project was something I started to do one day as a free-form exercise. The object was to start making something something with no end vision in mind, and see what starts to form. 

I must have been thinking "tree people" that day because that it what came out. This project was stalled for a very long time because I had no idea how to do leaves.

I tried to leave it bare, but that did not look right either. For the leaves I ended up experimenting with two different techniques, resulting in a rater primitive looking tree. I think it works, and who is to say what tree people look like? Maybe they were alive with the dinosaurs when the trees looked like this. ;)

For the lighter green flat leaves I made them like this: I took some wool of several different colors and mixed them by hand, pulling the mass of wool apart from the center to really mix the colors. (I could do this as the end result was going to be wet felted anyway. It is not how I would generally recommend mixing colors.) Then I took a bit of the wool and a couple of drops of water, and rubbed it in between my palms. Kind of like how you would make a snake out of clay as a kid. I left an end fuzzy so that it could be easily attached to the branches. After about 20 seconds of this wet felting I took opposite sides of the tube and pulled in several places to give it a more of an undulating shape. 

For the dark green leaves I wrapped a thin piece of green wool around a toothpick over and over to form a tube around the toothpick. Even after all the wool is wrapped on go around a couple more times with your fingers to really smooth down the wool. Then I added some water to further smooth down the outside wool before pulling it off the toothpick.

Finally, because the bottom looked unfinished, I added a base using different shades of green to help anchor the tree onto the thick piece of felt.

I am really surprised that I made this tree person, and that I had to finish it, as it s not my style. However, that is the real beauty of free form creating. You get to make things that you never would have thought of before.

Have you made free form things before? How did they turn out?

Swirl inspiration, needle felt style.

I have been inspired by the many colors and textures that one can get from needle felting with just yarn.

My first thought was that I could take scraps of handspun and create random swirls and colors with various yarns in a recognizable silhouettes. 

Note: Here I am felting on a 100%wool felt background with 100% non-superwash wool.

This was my first piece that I did yesterday. I tried to make the yarn go in unexpected directions, but kept the color changes in, almost, predictable places. I hoped in doing so, that it would catch peoples attention and make them really look at what was going on. Maybe it would cause the observer to stop and think.

Yes that orange really is that bright.

Using different thicknesses of yarn will create a 3D effect.

Just think of how many silhouettes that you could try! I tried this morning one of the most simple shapes, a circle. I choose a yarn that I have had for a while, some Schaefer Eliane. I won this at a knit-in-pubic day in Ithaca. Yes the colors really are that bright.

I started with a simple spiral, then I let the yarn go where it wanted for a while, as long as it stayed with in the confines of the circle. I am stabbing with a single felting needle with my right hand as my left hand guides the yarn. The felting needle is what will 'glue' the yarn onto the felt background.

This is where I cut the first time. All of that was one piece of yarn.

Then I started somewhat randomly filling in the shape. You can cut all you want while needle felting, you just have to make sure that you really secure the ends, as they have a tendency to fray out.

 The resulting piece reminds me of paisley.

The yarn is a thick and thin so there really is a lot of lovely texture.

 I am inspired to try more. What about different shades of the same color all swirled together? What about complementary colors twining around each other? What about combining classic color combinations and silhouettes together? Like a black and white penguin?

What do you think? Have I inspired you to try this? 

New shop and Needle felting kits

Now that it is July, I am done with my teaching job and have officially opened my own store!

The idea of the store began with the fact that Spain does not have as many fiber related craft stores as I would like it to.  So seeing this as an opportunity I thought about what I would do or make to fill this gap. I thought about dyeing wool and making batts to sell to the future spinners of Spain. And while I am learning the ways of the dye pot and I hope to sell hand dyed fiber soon, I was really excited about an idea that came to me one day in February.

One of my, not so secret, passions is needle felting. One of my favorite ways to needle felt is by "painting" with the fiber on a flat surface. When I first started needle felting I really liked the idea of a fiber painting for my wall. A piece of art that showcases both my skill and my love of wool. I am a completely self-taught needle-felter so when I first started painting with fiber I did not really know what I was doing. I found out that the flat technique takes less wool than sculpting with wool does, and it is easy to move and change position and thickness of the wool, i.e. it is hard to make mistakes that are not easily fixed.  One day (May 2010) it occurred to me that I could felt with yarn too. From there it was only a matter of time before I thought of using black yarn between brilliant patches of brightly colored felt and making something that seemed like stained glass or a mosaic.

I made this:

Fast forward to February 2013 where I am thinking what products to sell in my future shop. What would people want? Maybe there is a kit that I could offer that no one else has?

I  got out a Sharpie and some colored pencils and I set to work making three designs:

I pulled out my drumcarder and set to work creating the colors. All of the colors include lowlight, a highlight and, maybe, an unexpected complementary to really make the colors glow. I needed to capture the glowing/streaked look of stained glass.

I did the first test piece to make sure that the colors complemented each other, and the whole design really came through. 

Iris

Maybe you had noticed from the color pencil mock-up of the Poinsettia above that the original colors I chose for the "frame" did not work. It is the dark blue-brown that I chose for the frame here that really makes the red of the flower "pop".

Poinsettia 

Next came the instruction booklet. I wrote it up and sent it to some lovely testers, some of whom had never needle felted before. I had great feedback. The instructions have been tested, tech edited and is also available in Spanish!

Robin on a Branch

The next part was sourcing my materials for the kit. All of the materials for the painting are 100% wool. The background felt I was even able to source here in Madrid. The creation of the kit took some time and creativity. The hardest part was figuring how to stencil my design on the background! Also black non-superwash wool is surprisingly hard to find in Europe.

Finally my boxes arrived and the kits are ready to go.

One of my testers had a ton of ideas for more designs, and I recently finished two more based on her suggestions.

Bunny

Sunflowers

If you want to, you can follow my new store on Facebook where I share my process as well as other needle felting tips I find.

I have not forgotten about more pictures form Ávila, those will come soon.

Wool brain

I had the awesome idea to make a picture of a brain, with the different areas done in different colors of yarn. So I go where I normally go for images to work from...Google search images.

My favorite was this one:

Source here

The more I thought about it the more I realized that maybe I was making the project to complicated for the medium of needle felting. I wanted to make a yarn brain, but the multiple colors might not make sense without a lot of detail. So I went on a hunt for brain colored wool in my stash. (OK I know that brains are not pink until exposed to air, but I wanted a pink-ish brain.)

I quickly discovered that I had some yarn the color that I wanted, but it was too tightly plied and the grist was too small to make the cerebrum's folds at the scale that I wanted. So I pulled out three colors of wool, carded them together, and spun a thick and thin single. Perfect color, perfect thickness.

Here it is on the spindle with the hand-dyed yarn I used for the crevices of the cerebrum.

As with all art projects, you tend to go where the work takes you, that is half of the fun.

I ended up trying some things and ripping them out. The best thing about needle felting is that it is really easy to rip out the wool and to try again if the shape or scale is off. 

At first I was using some handspun for the cerebellum, but the color, shape and texture was off. I ended up ripping it out and using the same color of wool that I was using in the crevices of the cerebrum. I added some dark red to the bottom, to add more depth to the section, and put as many white branches as possible in this scale to make the Arbor vitae.

I also ended up redoing a lot of the posterior folds.

I put an outline around everything so that it would stand out. I left off the face portion, because doing faces is not where my talent lies.

I really like how it turned out. A brain made of yarn. Yarn Brain. Wool Brain. This is Your Brain on Wool.

And that is why I really wanted to finish it, to play with the title. Well that and we need more science based art. 

Which title is best?