It has been a week since I got off the bus in Blonduos, what is that saying “Time flies when you are having fun”. The weather has been crappy all day, heavy overcast and snow squalls this evening a perfect day for staying in and felting.

Here is a picture from the studio this morning.

A grey day but lots of stuff happening in my felting world.

I laid out this piece yesterday and let it dry overnight so I could get started on it first thing in the morning. I thoughtyou might be interested in some progress photos so this is the piece before I started Working on it.

It it is about 12″ x 17″ and is very lightly felted. To the right are four different sizes of marbles I am going to use.

I  put marbles into the piece securing them with the elastic bands that dentists use on braces. They work real well to keep marbles in felt. You don’t place the elastic too close to the marble as you need some room for the felt to shrink. You get the piece all wet and soapy and you roll it and rub it and roll it and rub it lots more times, take a break, go for a glass of water, rub and roll some more, more water until finally it is ready to start throwing where the real shrinkage starts to happen.   After a hundred throws or so it is ready to be rinsed and dried so you can cut into it.  This is what it looks like now.

It it is about 7″ x 6″ and will stay that size.  It is sitting on a radiator drying overnight and tomorrow morning I should be able to cut into this coral piece and the one with the cords.  Seeing what emerges when you cut is such fun.

Once I got the marble piece done I made two brain coral and both pieces turned out fabulous!

They are velvet over wool roving and as the wool shrinks the fibres that I persuaded through the velvet pull the velvet and make those wonderful puckers.  Don’t you just love them? I have one more brain coral planned for the morning and then I will be almost out of velvet so I will have to make something else.

Busy studio day today but a great one. Thanks for reading.