Felt Landscape Painted With Wool
Felt – a wonderful creative medium
I love how versatile lambs wool fibres can be. As well as making wearable things such as scarves, slippers and bags you can use it to make beautiful pictures, as several students on my Felted Landscape did recently.
Felt landscape
How to design with wool
Each student chose a landscape picture to use as a basis for their design. Then I taught them how to lay down the colourful fibres to create a picture based on their chosen scene.
The beautiful soft lambswool fibres when seen under a microscope have tiny hooks along each hair. When wet, soaped and agitated these interlock to form a fabric that is surprisingly strong. The wool comes dyed in a variety of colours but I also dye my own.
With artists paint you can mix your pallet to create new colours, and you can also do this with dyed wool fibres. I show students how to create their own blends to use in their completed piece, or they blend as they create their painting. The fibres are carefully laid out to represent the landscape. It’s fun seeing how each felted landscape develops with no two being the same.
Laying down wool fibres
The loosely laid out fibres then have to be felted together to blends the tiny hooks I mentioned. Once this part is complete, your felt picture is rinsed to wash the soap out and dried ready for detail to be added. Detailed embellishment can be added in the form or stitch or by incorporating additional wool or silk with the needle felting technique. Special needles are used to hook additional fibres in to your masterpiece.
Felted picture
Once completed, the finished piece of felt is very strong so that durable items such as slippers and upholstered footstools are made from the woolly fibres. I cover this in some of my other courses.
See how it’s done
You can see a two short videos of this on my website home page which will be easier to visualise.
Feltworld videos
I have taught children from 4 years up to 95 years – it is not a hard process to pick up.
The students in this weekend class all had a great time and left with some beautiful felted landscapes. All materials and a lovely lunch are included to make your day a pleasant creative experience.
If you’d like to join me next time or see what other courses I run, please visit www.feltworld.co.uk/courses to book a place or email me on mail@feltworld.co.uk
Barbara
