I spent most of the day in the studio and created a few piece for your viewing pleasure. I finished the piece that was felted yesterday but not dry.  Once it was nice and dry this morning and as you can see I did lots of cutting.

Not really sure what it is but it already has a place on the coral reef.

I was looking at all of the embellishments I brought from home and realized I had not used any silk hankies yet so I decided to make a coral thingy with blue and purple silk hankies with yellow roving and once I completed that one I figured one with blue roving would really show how different they look with different coloured backgrounds.

You would probably not guess that these both have the same coloured silk hankies on them.  Too much fun, I may make one more in a different colour just to show more possibilities.

The last piece for today is going to be a sea anemone but for right now it kind of looks like a vase but I have grand plans.

I will will work on it tomorrow once it is dry and add more components and it should turn into something fun.

My cold is slowly going away and tomorrow I should be back to pretty much normal.

Thanks for reading.

Yesterday I started on a small coral reef and this morning I got it finished and stuffed. It is meant to be a backdrop for the other creatures and coral that I am making, add some colour to the background. I got it a bit more colourful than I wanted but with enough things on it I think it will do the job.  The hole in the middle ended up much too big so I will have to figure out a way to make it appear smaller.  Any suggestions anyone?

The coral reef is the thing with the hole in the middle. Enough said.

I started on a much smaller piece as I am suffering from a head cold and I was not up to any large projects today. Some of you are not familiar with felting so I thought I would do a play by play of this piece. It is 4 layers of wool in 4 different colours and is approximately 12″ x 12″. 1st layer. Is a raspberry colour, as I am in Iceland I am using Icelandic wool instead of my usual merino.

2nd layer is green , kind of hard to see in this picture, is laid perpendicular to the layer underneath.

3rd and 4th layers more of the same, so now there are 4 layers of wool and I wet that out, it is laying on bubble wrap with the bubble side up,  I put the bubble wrap over top as well as under the wool and rub over the surface to make sure the piece is wet through.  Then I start to roll it.  I wrap the bubble wrap around a pool noodle and wrap that in a towel, I am making this into a prefelt as I have more plans for it so I roll it 100 times on each side until it starts to make a very soft piece of felt.

Take it out of the bubble wrap, let it dry and start to stitch it as I want to make a creature that has folds, I stitch up three sections of the felt. Wet and soap it and felt it until it is good and firm and rinse all of the soap out of it.  This is what the piece now looks like, you can see some of the stitching.  I will take that out tomorrow and start to cut away at the wings to show the different colours that I laid out.  The piece is drying overnight.

Thanks for checking what is going on in my world.

I did not get much felting done today as I have a head cold and feeling rough. I got a coral reef laid out and started to felt it, this will be a backdrop for my sea creatures. This is the restist I am using.

This is is a fairly large piece for me to work on and I had to make sure it fit on my bubble wrap so it is about 22″ x 40″ and I laid out all sorts of bright colours so it would look like a very crazy coral reef might look like. I did roll it for a while late in the afternoon but it is now resting for the night.

I went water jogging and to the grocery store for head cold supplies so I should be good for a couple of days.  I was talking with a fellow while I sat in the hot pool, he was waiting for his son to finish soccer practise.  He works on a fishing trawler and goes out for 30 or 40 days at a time and then has that same amount of time off.  He said it was a good paying job, because the work is physically demanding, if you did not have additional schooling. It is interesting to get to meet people at the pool and certainly lots of people go to the pool.

That’s it for me for now, hopefully I will feel better in the morning.

This is what I was using as my reference for a sand crab I was creating:

and this is my version:

I think she turned out pretty well. I was trying to figure out how to make hollow legs so I tried wrapping wool around 4 straws and rolled it until it started to shrink, then around 2 straws and then around 1 and finally rolling the legs on themselves and it worked a treat.  I am pleased with this little gal.

I made a bug that must be shy or something as I could not get a good picture so please excuse the crappy picture but it gives you an idea about the bug, it is next to some brain coral.

I used the straw method to make his legs as well and then pinned them while they were drying so it looks like he has feet.

This is a picture of the final brain coral I made dried and stuffed:

They are just so much fun to make and to look at.

It was a lovely sunny day and I went for a walk beside the river.  There is a good path and I often see folks out walking along it. I walked toward town, there were a number of ducks and geese in the river, I watched the current moving some ducks downstream pretty fast. This is a tidal river so when the tide comes in you see the birds floating the other direction.  It was the nicest day we have had since arriving so I sat outside on a park bench and read my book for a while, a lovely way to spend part of Sunday afternoon.

Nothing more from the felting room today, Monday tomorrow so I will have to get cracking on some new projects, stay tuned.

“”If we don’t have time to fail we don’t have time to create.”

Yes there is a reason for this saying, I definitely have one piece that is on my fail list but I also have an awesome piece so I guess they even out. First I will show you the piece that will probably not travel back to Canada with me. To start with I have no idea why I choose the colours except that, in my own defence, I was thinking there would be more colour come through from the different colours underneath but no such luck.

I spent a very long time making the cords for this piece and it is bug ugly. I can’t see any redeeming virtues, I tried cutting into it, that is what the plan was but it is so hard to cut as the Icelandic wool is thicker and I will tell you I have this baby felted. I am going to let it sit around for a couple of days but then I think I will cut the cords out, I can re-use them and just count it as a loss.  I have made about 8 or 10 of these using merino and they have all worked out so it is my inexperience using Icelandic wool that caused this one to fail and the colour choice, don’t forget the colours.  When this one seemed irredeemable I though I should go onto something I could do so I made another brain coral.

I put the piece on top of the resist I used and you can see how much it shrunk but isn’t it fun. It is now stuffed and drying and I will take another picture tomorrow so you get the real finished product.

The other piece that worked extremely well was the coral piece. Once it was dry I cut out the marbles and cut into it in a lot of places and it is awesome!

I am sure you have to agree this is a thing of beauty, well it is in my mind.  So one really good piece and one really bad piece. I have a couple of small bugs on the go but they won’t be finished until tomorrow so you will have to come back to see what they look like.

My day started with an email from a friend who is at the Hand Weavers, Spinners and Dyers of Alberta annual conference being held this year in Red Deer.  I try to go but this year I thought I would come to Iceland instead.  The email advised me that I had  won the felting category with my 3d sculptures.  I made three smaller sculptures, one in black, one in yellow and one a light purpley colour and called them the Three Amigos. I am really stoked as it is always nice to be recognized for the time it takes to learn your craft.  I am hoping to get some pictures of them in the show and the whole show will be travelling to High River, Camrose and maybe Calgary.  I will let you know more once I know the schedule.

So so all in all a good day, I went to the pool and water jogged and then sat in the hot pool and I felted, a perfect day.

 

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.

I made progress on my 3 D sculpture, it is felted and sitting on top of a towel on one of the radiators drying with the cords that were sticking out pinned into curly tails. I despaired of it every getting made into decent felt but by mid afternoon I had whipped it into shape, or in this case I had dropped it many thousands of times and it was finally felted.  I still wonder why I chose to make the outside red and blue but I am hoping that will not be quite so obvious once I start cutting into it. It needs to be quite dry before I can start to cut so that may not be tomorrow as it will take a while to dry. But I am just so pleased to have it felted, not the same way a sculpture made of merino would have felted but it is felted. I do wonder if I worked it a bit too much before I  pulled out the resist and put the cords in.  Only one way to find that out and that would be to make another one and that won’t be happening right away.

After lunch Johanna, the Centre’s director, talked to Amanda and I about the history of the Icelandic sheep, We are both very interested in all things sheepy. Johanna showed us the short and extremely long hair shorn from the sheep and then she carded some and spun on both a spinning wheel and a drop spindle. It was very informative, it gives me a lot more understanding of the Icelandic sheep.

Late afternoon I went to the bank to exchange some money, then to the pool to water jog for 15 minutes and then sat in the hot pool and finally to the grocery store. I am starting to recognize some of the people who work there and they really have stuff that I would not have imagined. They have Campbell’s soup and lots of Cadbury chocolate and stuff from around the world.  Who would have known that.

I did not get my after lunch nap as Johanna was here so I may try to make an early night of it.

Today I finished the last of the cords and my hands feel like it tonight. I made 2 long cords. 3 slightly shorter cords and 2 short cords.  This is what the piece looked like before I cut it open and put the cords in place.

I have now started the felting process which will take a day or two to complete. The feeling is all done by hand, no rolling for these pieces and that tires out my hands. I also added some more hollow tubes to the coral piece. Two more to attach but they are still damp, I will get them on tomorrow morning.

We had visitors today from the NES residency at nearby Skagastrond, a video guy, a worker in leather and one more but a I can’t remember what craft she works in. They were interested in my felt work and I talked a bunch about what I was working on and then they went to visit Amanda in the weaving studio. We plan on going to Skagastrond to see their work and where they stay. Apparently they are near a pub so that is some enticement to visit, the only bar here is across the river and it is quite the hike so probably won’t visit it.

Johanna, the Centre’s director, brought her friend Hanna to visit.  Hanna works in this building and brought me a poster with fish that you can find around Iceland, I am working on more Under the Sea creatures.  There are some familiar fish there but also many we don’t have, no Greenland shark for us!

I gave my hands a rest so no felting after supper tonight, I set stuff up for the morning so I can alternate between felting the 3D sculpture and start on a coral with marble protrusions.

I went to the pool today for the first time and it was an enjoyable experience. You have to shower before you can go into the pool, which is outdoors and heated naturally by all of the geothermal activity.  This means that you take off all of your clothes and shower with everyone else, in my case 8 teenage girls, put your swim suit on and walk outside to get into the swimming pool. Fortunately the walk was very short, the temperature was about 3 C and the pool nice and warm. Not being a very accomplished swimmer I did some water jogging and then went into the hot 37 to 39 C pool, there was another pool that was 39 to 41 C but it was too hot for me. The teenage girls were being taught by a swim coach, all kids in school take swimming lessons from the kindergarten kids all the way to high school, what a great system.  The pool is right beside the school so no bussing involved.

Back in the studio I have 3 cords completed, the 4th wet out but no felting done and one more to go.  It does not feel like I accomplished much today but making cords is hard on the hands so I did not want to abuse my hands too much so I took it as easy as I could.  Once I get the cords completed tomorrow I can get them sewn in and start the felting on the sculpture that I am creating.

I bought fish cakes for supper, they were quite good which is a good thing as there are enough for 3 more meals.  Amanda is a vegetarian and as we have been sharing supper most nights I have not been eating much meat.  So far I can’t say as I miss meat but should I smell a nice greasy burger I think I would have a good feed of beef.

Sunny and cool here again today, most mornings there is some candled ice floating in the river so breakup is happening further up the mountains.  Wish me luck getting the last two cords felted tomorrow.