I’ve recently made a new felt picture of lapwings so I thought I’d show you how I went about it.Īs you’ll know, if you’ve read my other blogs here, I live on the East Kent coast in the UK and am particularly fond of the local birds. I would love to hear your ideas for experimentation so please leave a comment with your “what if’s”. I haven’t even begun to scrape the surface with how paper and felt can be used together. I love asking ‘what if’ and trying out these ideas, which lead to new ideas and further experimentation. How else could I use the paper besides tree trunks? How would scraps of green paper felt in to make foliage? What would a variety of colors of paper layered over each other and then felted look like? I definitely need to do more experiments with landscapes and paper. The tree worked well and the paper really stands out to make the tree the focal point of the landscape. I will probably add a few more leaves to the tree as well and perhaps a bit of detail to the rest of the landscape. I plan to add some free motion machine stitching to add more interest in the tree and more branches as well. Again, I treated this gently to allow the paper to felt in. Here’s the piece after wetting down and curbing the edges a bit before felting. (This also works for my spring tree for our year long tree challenge.) The piece is pretty small and ended up about 7″ x 9″ after felting. This is the layout of wool and a paper birch tree. Next on to experimenting with paper in my landscapes. Hmmm… how can I use this leaf paper in a design? What would happen if I added ink or dye to the paper before felting? What if I dry brushed paint over the surface of the paper after felting? What else could I do to the surface to enhance the feel of leafiness? How would hand or machine stitching look on the surface? Will it be easy to stitch through? Any other experimental ideas for me? Obviously, more samples to follow. I think if I had done a lot of wringing of the felt it would have distorted the leaf but I was careful to avoid fulling in that manner. It felted very easily and doesn’t seem much different than the thinner papers. I wondered whether I would lose the embossed lines of the leaf, whether the paper thickness was too heavy to felt in easily and if it would felt differently than the thinner papers I had tried previously. The wool and paper were then wet down (sorry for the blurry photo) and I felted as I had on my previous paper samples, treating the paper as if it was fabric as in nuno felting. I tore out a single leaf and placed it over a small torn piece of green, short fiber merino batt. The question was whether it would felt easily to the surface. It is fairly thick and the embossed portions are really thick. I loved the paper but never used it for anything. I have had this mulberry paper with leaves embossed on it for quite a while. I have continued with my experimentations with mulberry paper and felting.
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