Nuno Felted Picture

Earlier in the year we did Nuno felting at the Guild and I made this piece to demonstrate to the girls how to make a background scene-and then it was put away in places unknown until this week when I found it again while I was looking for something else.
Seeing as I was looking for stuff for the exhibition and for the sales table I decided to embroider it.

I didn't want to add too much to it-by that I mean I didn't want it to be too bulky so I used running stitch to outline the hills- the sky and clouds.
I then added French Knots and straight stitch to look like wildflowers.
At first I had lots of different colours in the French Knots but I pulled them out because it looked too unreal-what I really wanted it to look like was subtle.
I left the centre grassland area free of stitches to give it a bit of contrast.
I does look nicer in real life.

I am not sure whether to frame it or put it onto a box canvas board.

I found a few more pieces as well and have stitched them--I will show you tomorrow.

A great weekend

I have been away for a few days on another coach trip which was very enjoyable.
But I have just had the best weekend that I have spent in a long time.
I have been at a 2 day workshop doing Nuno felting with Fiona Wright an Australian felter who does the most amazing work. If you ever get the opportunity to do a workshop with this lady then go for it.I am showing a few of the samples that I made but they will have stitching on them later.
I first laid out a piece of black cotton Voile fabric and then placed the white wool fibre in a fine layer at right angles on top -then I placed pieces of silk fabric -either Paj-Chiffon or Organza on top .
I had placed a fine layer of georgette on top but I removed it before I started the felting process.
When I finished this I didn't like it because it was a bit disjointed.

This is the back and you can see how the white wool fibres have migrated through.

This is the piece after I had done running stitch on it-now I am happy with it. It is so soft and drapes beautifully.

This is my second sample using the same technique but I have used a different backing fabric.

I will stitch on this later in the week.

Here is the backing fabric which is a piece of cotton Sari fabric.

This is the back of my 3rd sample and I used blue cotton voile fabric this time.

The front of this sample is a piece of black silk organza that I had discharged in a workshop about 8 years ago and the discharged colour is a cream/soft green.The backing fabric was covered with raspberry coloured wool fibres plus lime green and then I added a small amount of teal wool scattered in a few places.
When this had felted up the fibres had migrated both to the back and front which is what it is suppose to do.

I am going to stitch this with perle 8 cotton and I will post it on the blog later-but first I have to do last weeks TAST sample.

As I said before I thoroughly enjoyed this class-I had done a class before in Nuno felting but I have learned so much from these 2 days and can't wait to do some more.

A point to note also is if you are doing Nuno felting you need a natural fabric for the backing and you need to test it because sometimes the tag says 100% cotton but in fact it could have polyester in it and also the cheapest crappy cotton fabric which has a loose weave is usually the best and should felt up perfectly.