TAST, Felted Wool, Quilting Arts Magazine

Howdy!

We got a wonderful snow storm last night and it got me all motivated to get off my butt and do something new and exciting!

First of all, I finally got started on my TAST, Take a Stitch Tuesday. I am way, way behind but that is okay! Better late than never! I really want to do some Crazy Quilting. I now have a lovely assortment of fabrics and threads to work with, thanks to some very generous friends but I need to get comfortable with the stitches.

My sewing machine is still buried under those few remaining things that need to have a spot found for them, in my "Art" room reorganizing. So, I decided not to wait till I could get at my machine and sew the edges of my fabric samples so they won't fray. I used the fabric as is. And yes, I could have used the Buttonhole stitch to stitch around the edge, but too many ideas and images went flying through my head to do that!!

The Fly Stitch was first in week 1:

And Week 2 was the Buttonhole Stitch:

I had great fun trying out these stitches, but I felt that I really needed to do something with them, but wasn't sure what. Alot of ideas came to mind but it was while looking through a June/July 2010 issue of Quilting Arts magazine that I got a brain fart and my heart started to beat faster.

There was an article in there by Jane LaFazio on Needle-Felted hand-stitched fiber art that I just knew I had to do and I thought it would be perfect to try out all my new stitches on!

The first thing I did was cut out a piece of felted wool from a stash that I had. There is a wool Mill on PEI that is quite wonderful. It is on the eastern part of the island and is called Belfast Mini Mills. I happened in there one day when they had some freshly processed wool! OH MY!!! The wool was so soft, you couldn't even feel it! They will take whatever you have, including hair from your dog and process it whatever way you want. Another time when I was in there, they were just starting to process some Musk Ox fur that someone from the Arctic sent them.

Anyways, they have this machine that felts wool by pressure and you can buy just about any size if you pre-order, but if you just pop in, they have I believe its 4 feet by 4 feet sheets of it. It comes in white or mixed colours. Both are shown here:

This picture below isn't great but the sheet of wool is about a half inch thick.

I used the mixed colours and cut out a piece of felted wool the size of the closed magazine or 8 1/2 inches by 11 inches.

I picked out some wool roving from what we had and layed them on the felted wool sheet. I do not have a felting machine so used a hand needle felter to felt the coloured wool onto the base.

I made 2 separate small circles with various colours and then felted them to the project. Some coloured wool fibers were wound around the circles and I felted them as much as I could. I also found an old sweater that was destined for the waste as it was too gnarly to go to the thrift store. I cut out a circle from it and it forms the pale green small circle below.
It was finally time to add my two learned stitches, the Fly Stitch, which can be found in red in the lower left corner, and the Buttonhole Stitch which is done in various colours around the large circles. I could do more but thought I would wait until I learned some new stitches and see what I might like to do.
When I have a camera in my hands, the earth stands still. I am at peace and am really almost at one with what is around me. I love nature. Plain and simple. I love trees, I love the sound of the wind in the trees, I love the birds that sing in the trees, I love the smell of hot sand at the beach, and the sound of the surf pounding on shore. I love the smell of the earth in the summer after a good rain, and the fresh salty air of the sea. But, when I am with threads and fabric or wool, my heart beats faster and my mind flies. And the imagination soars! And that was my day today!

Enjoy life, enjoy yourself.