Sunset on a good life

I finished this piece on Friday, the same day my husband and I had to say goodbye to one of the family. Making these sunsets can be fun, and I was thinking of making it and putting it in my store, but now I think that I will keep it as a beautiful momento of a beautiful life.

I was luckily enough to know Bandit for 11 years. He was with me for five moves across three states and two countries. In him, I always had a friend to keep me company as I was looking for jobs and getting to know a new city. He and his brother were always preforming antics or being drop-dead adorable to distract me from worries or loneliness. He would always check on my every couple of hours if I was home to get a hug or to ask for food. Until the last months, he would always great me at the door.

Bandit on my handspun crochet blanket

About three years Ago I did a felt portrait of him, just to see if I could. I think I was able to capture the smile and the love in his eyes.

Needle felted portrait

Photo that the portrait was based upon

 Bandit was the other one in the household that loved wool, and things made from wool, as much as I did. He loved to huff (smell deeply) and roll in wool, be wrapped in wool blankets, and play with the wool toys I made him.

Classic sunbeam shot

 There are too many words, and none at all to describe the love we had for each other. So anything I can think to say seems, insufficient. I know that he was one of the great loves of my life, and one of the best friends I will ever have. He would come to comfort me when I was sad, cheer me up if I was angry, and celebrate with me when I was happy.

His fur was a soft as a bunny.

I know that I will miss him everyday for the rest of my life, and that I was very lucky to have known him.

Goodbye Bandit, rest in peace.

Art challenge Day 7

So I missed another day in my self imposed challenge. This was actually made, for the most part, yesterday and refined today.

I got my inspiration from this Spanish artist, who cuts designs out of leaves.

I wanted to see if I could copy it in felt.

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?