This is my 24th Weekly Mixed Media piece this year.
This is an extremely busy week for me, so I wanted to create something quickly. I decided to use scraps of felt from past weeks, and to create a felted collage with them. When ever I try to do something quickly in felt, it never works out that way, including this project.
I picked five strips of felt, that I thought would look good together, and blend well when felted.
I positioned them close to each other on top of a 10" square piece of orange pre-felted fleece. Then I proceeded to needle punch it form the top down. Many of the strips from other weeks were very very thick, and I quickly broke 2 needles. The felting needles cost a lot of money, and they are a pain in the neck to replace, so I quickly decided to stop using my needle punch machine, and to use my sewing machine to finish up, instead.
This is what the back looked like when I stopped felting.
I placed the halfway felted piece on top of an 11" square piece of cotton quilt batting, since one layer of the pre-felted orange fleece was not strong enough to hold everything together.
Then I matched the felt with colors of sewing thread, and zig-zagged (or scribbled) back and forth, over the different pieces of felt. The picture above is a detail, to explain. The bad news it, it took a very long time to do this. The good news is there's a lot of texture, and I didn't break any more needles, though my sewing machine did have a heard time going through some of the layers.
After I finished stitching, I cut the entire piece down to 6" square.
This is what the back of the piece looks like.
You can see my 2008 weekly mixed media work (so far) on my website, and read about my process/progress here on my blog.
