Free week in TAST, catch up! Felted piece

Hello!

Wow! What a wild week! This past tuesday, snow, 90 kph winds! And yes, there is a road out in front of my neighbours house!

The day after. Have you ever seen Sepia snow? lol The strong winds blew all the snow off the farm fields behind the house and then attacked the top layer of red iron rich soil and threw that around. You end up with a sepia world!


Well, I have finished my felted piece. If you remember from a previous post on this blog, I tried to combine two lessons in one. I wanted to try a needle felted wool art piece but I also wanted to use it to practice my TAST stitches. Well, I got a bit carried away the last few days.

I really feel like I need to explain a bit before posting photos. We have learned a number of stitches so far, but I found that not all were suitable for felt. The thread easily got caught up in the fluff from the felt no matter how much I tried needle felting the felt. I probably ripped out more stitches than are in this piece.

After applying all the stitches I could, I felt the whole piece still needed something so I decided to add a few beads, JUST TO ONE AREA. Boy, did I ever get carried away! I thought I was did great but then I took photos of the finished product and thought... OMG, what was I thinking??? Before looking at the felted piece, I have to say one thing. The blues in the photo are much much richer than they are in real life. They are also much shinier looking. I tried adjusting all sorts of things using the limited photo software that I had to try to make the photo more realistic, but this is the best I could do. The finished felted piece with TAST stitches:


I will show a close up of this section first as I want to provide an explanation of what it is.


When I first did this section, I wanted to practice the whipped wheel so took a button that would fit inside the circle and then started the whipped wheel on top of the button in the hopes of giving it some dimension. I got so much fuzz in it became difficult to work with, and once I got to
the edge of the button, I didn't know how to proceed. You can just make out some fuzz in the photo above the button below.


I cut the whole thing off and pondered the situation for a bit. After searching around the house, I finally decided to use the cap from a bottle of water. I just took a hammer and a nail and punched a hole in the top so that I could put the needle and thread through. I didn't care that it was off centre as I felt that would just add more interest to the piece if the off centredness showed up.

But the same issue arose when I began the whipped wheel. I kept snagging wool in my threads. Again, more pondering. Had another AHA moment and got myself a sheet of printer paper and cut a hole in it the size of the bottle cap. I put it over the felted piece and did my whipped wheel!
And it worked wonderfully as shown below! I used this same colour design that I used for Sharon's Sumptuous Surfaces course as I thought the colours would work. I added a number of different colours to the whipped wheel, before finally using the whipped wheel stitch to add the orange fuzzy yarn.


This next section wasn't overly challenging and I wasn't going to do anything to it, but after adding beads everywhere else, it looked a bit naked so I dressed it up a bit with purple beads. It was a bit of a challenge because there was a plastic circle under all that thick thread but I just bent my beading needle and got as close to where I wanted the bead to be as possible.
Turned out pretty "dressed up". LOL

This is the tamest section in the whole piece. I thought a bit of normalcy might be a good idea!

I didn't add too much more to this since the last photo I posted but again, with all the beading on the project, it was looking a little bland, so I dressed it up a bit with some bugle beads and seed beads.


This last section probably has the most hours spent on it. You wouldn't believe what I tried couching and stitching onto this section. I ended up removing one couched yarn from what I originally had on there and adding the beads. I tried just about everything and didn't like anything I did. Kept cutting it out. I like the way this section looks but the photo unfortunately does not do it justice. It looks a mess. The bugle beads are red and gold and there are lime green glass beads in there as well. I buttonhole stitched a bit of green fuzzy yarn onto it too just to give some unity to the piece.


When I started this felt piece, I really thought it would be a throw away piece. I would learn to felt, throw on some practice stitches and throw it in a corner out of the way when I couldn't do any more on it. I like what I ended up with though and won't be throwing it into a corner!

If you have another minute, the Sunshine Deli (link above) has a cute poem about Percy the Pig.

Well, time for a bit of relaxation before bed.
Hope you are all enjoying yourself and talk to you later!