Did you ever have a time when you needed to try something new ?  Here are my ideas to be creative with stitched felt when my house is chaotic as it occupied by builders

The renovation and building work we planned on our house before we moved back to the UK is now well under way.  It will be wonderful when it’s finished but currently there is total chaos in our house and not much opportunity for wet felting.  But there is plenty of time for other things.

Last weekend I went to the felting day with the IFA region 10 felters.  The challenge for our stand at the knitting and stitching show at Harrogate in November is geometric man made forms.

This challenge made me think of the wonderful stitched felt of  Chung-Im Kim  which I saw  in the Netherlands in 2014.

Beautiful delicate surface texture , with tiny tiny stitches.

I decided to do some stitched felt experiments with some natural Shetland felt I made I while ago.   Trying to simulate the surface texture effects Chung-Im Kim used.

Hand stitched Felt

Maybe I am getting the hang of a technique that reproduces the effect. But it is quite time consuming and I feel my stitching is clumsy.

This make me thinks of fields , and I wonder if there is a way  to reproduce the beautiful effect you get when looking at the patterns of fields using this technique.

I persisted and extended my shetland piece in all directions.

Quite an interesting effect- rather more rough and ready

Stitched felt with the sewing machine

Doing this made me think about using my sewing machine, to create a similar effect.   I took some hand dyed shibori felt.

I then used a similar idea of a grid to create a small piece.

 
So although I have done no felting I think I have enough to keep me occupied until the chaos is over in a few months time.  Both pieces with be on show at the Harrogate knitting and stitching show between the 23rd-26th November 2016.