A day of felt making

Bronte & Anne came up to the Barn at the beginning of September to spend the day learning how to make felt using the wetfelting method.  
Felt making is something I didn't think I would be interested in as I had an impression in my head that it involved large amounts of water and lots of stamping up and down and swooshing about in big baths and bowls of water.  How wrong could I be!  After seeing the totally unique and utterly charming cockeral teacosy made by one friend for anothers hen party I thought that it might be something I'd like to have a go at.  One class and I was hooked.  Totally.  Addicted!  I use it mostly as an artwork medium and mix it with embroidery both machine & hand.  I am a bit of a lazy felter in that I want to move on to the next piece almost before I've finshed one.  
I'm always fascinated by watching other people m

Laying out fibre backgrounds for pictures

can you see the bottle of water to the left of the picture. Barely one of these gets used! So much for expecting there to be buckets and tin baths of water!

I'll be interested to see how this figure turns out during the felting process.

Anne's flowers with the beginng of some hand embroidered detailling.

Little beads being added to the centre of the flowers.

She went a little wonky on the arms and her shoulders got a bit wide, but we loved how her dress 'flowed'

We added some 'freeflowing' fibre as fly ing about and away hair.

Bronte is going to do some embroidery in to this to enhance the brambles and the leaf shapes.

This lovely stripy piece of Bronte's started of as a landscape then turned to stripes, some dots were added, then some fish shapes joined the party! It's been made into a very jolly knitting needle roll.