Author Archives: ruthlane

Practical Felting and Color

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Here is my entry for the challenge this month on the Felting Forum. It is supposed to be practical. I haven’t had time to do much – this was made a couple of months ago. I use it for a coaster. It was my first experiment with thread sketching on felt.
Here’s a slightly closer photo. The design is from a bookmark that I got in Hawaii.
I have also recently read Exploring Color by Nita Leland. I found this book to be very useful. Sometimes I don’t end up liking the books by painters because they seem to have too much information but this book was great and had lovely examples. She suggests that you take whatever paints you have and use them to mix a color wheel. And then to try all the combinations of mixing each color with all the others. I didn’t do this with all my paints but it was fun. This first one is with water color pencils and there is a full page more of mixtures of all the colors.

This is with the Jacquard Textile Colors fabric paints.

This is with Dye-na-Flow Jacquard paints.

And finally I tried mixing Lumiere paints with the “primaries” of pink-gold, violet-gold and metallic gold. It didn’t give me a wide range of colors as there really wasn’t enough blue in the violet or red in the pink but it was an interesting experiment. Next week I get back to my regular schedule of having Fridays off so I hope to get more time to play with my fibers. I’ve got several projects that I want to get going so more later.
This last photo is using up the leftover Lumiere paints. I painted on a white background but thought it would look better black so I used a black magic marker on the back to color the white paper black.

Patterns

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I’m working on patterns in my studio journal. I chose to look at patterns in nature. There are so many choices of great patterns where ever you look. I found some photos of different objects with pattern and then sketched some variations.

I liked these two best.

The one on the right is a sea fan which you can’t see well. The photo was originally bright red but I printed all the photos in black and white so I could concentrate on the patterns and not the colors.

The one on the right is worm eaten wood.


I always like looking down from the ski lift at the patterns the wind makes in the snow. That’s a photo of snow on the left. I then made some stamps and used the stamps to make patterns.


Here’s all the stamps I made. I used that fun foam stuff that has a sticky back. It’s easy to cut out or you can just draw into it.


These are based on the butterfly.


This is based on wind blown sand.


And more organic lines.


This was based on a prior sketch in my journal.


The stamp on the right was supposed to be based on the bottom of the starfish. But it looks more like cobblestones to me.


The one on the left is based on the sea star but looks more like trees.


Here’s leaves and just a simple geometric pattern.


The single leaf stamp on the left and some doodles on the right.


These are some notes on making art that I found online that I thought were relevant.


I think if you click on them, you can read them.


This last stamp was based on a sketch of a stylized flower.

Felt United – International Day of Felt

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Hey all you felters out there. Go check out this website. It’s a world wide felting project – on October 3, 2009, felters all over the world will be displaying their felt. Display your felt – on your front door, in the park, along the road or on your car. Anywhere your heart desires… be wild! Have fun! Let the world see what you make. The theme this year is a slice of the color wheel, yellow through red. So make a flag, rug, wrap a tree or whatever with yellow, orange and red and let the world know that you are a felter!

Photo Box

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I finally made myself a photo light box. This is a very poor photo of it! I used a cardboard box, a sheet, two table lamps and some freezer paper for the back drop. All stuff I already had on hand and it really works pretty well. I would like to get some of the photo backdrop that professionals use but I haven’t ordered that yet.

Here’s a photo taken in the box. It’s better than the photos that I took originally. This is Slime who I needle felted some time ago. He’s looking a little pensive today. I am still working on my application for the Landscapes Pfaff challenge – that’s one reason I wanted the light box so I could try for a better photo. I also made lots of felted cat toys and I have to put the finshing touches on those. So I am getting some work done in the fiber direction but not as much as usual as I have to work at the store on Fridays throughout May. Hopefully, I’ll be back to Fridays off in June.