I can’t remember if I have talked about this project here or if I said something about it over at The Felting and Fiber Studio. But one of the non-profit organizations where I am a volunteer was looking for a new fund-raiser. The idea came up to have artists “decorate” a ski lift chair and then auction them off. The organization provides transportation to and from the ski hill so it seemed like a good fit. Guess who’s in charge of the fund-raiser? Not sure why I say yes to these things but I just need one more thing to do!

This is what the chairs look like now and they are big, over seven feet long. And because yes, I need to do more than just be the head of the fund-raising event, our group decided to decorate a chair. So we are working on a proposal for the chair and yesterday, we started making some elements for the chair.

Here’s a sketch of our proposal. The seat benches will be covered with eco printed felt, there will be felt rocks under one side and a bower of leaves climbing up the overhead support. We started working on the leaves. Some are made from copper wire, some from flat copper, some from felt and some with machine stitched threads.

Here we are working away at Louise’s house. Louise already has all the metal smithing tools so she showed us how to use them and off we went.

It was fun pounding, stringing beads and shaping our leaves.

Here’s all the leaves we created. There are a couple of thread leaves and one felt leaf in there too.

Here’s a little closer view of what the leaves will look like. The wire ones without anything in them aren’t done. Some will turn into felt or thread stitched leaves, others will get beaded wires wrapped around them. Deb pointed out to us partway through that we needed some larger leaves since the chair is so big and the smaller ones would be really disproportionate. So we made a few bigger ones. We have lots more to go so I’m sure we’ll have all kinds of sizes by the time we’re finished. I’ll keep you updated on how the project is going. I have never worked on a project this big or collaboratively so it is going to be fun and I’m sure I will learn a lot.

We have to turn in a proposal and get it accepted but we are kind of getting ahead of ourselves. But I’m sure it will work out in the end. I have made a Facebook page for the fund-raiser. I would appreciate it if you’d go and like the page and spread the word. We are still looking for other artists in the Flathead Valley of northwest Montana to participate.