Greetings from the rain forests of eastern Massachusetts, where we have had torrential downpours every day this week. Yesterday alone we got 4.38" in Natick, the town I live in! To keep myself from getting totally depressed, I took some time to make my 30th Weekly Mixed Media piece this year. The top photo is the front side and the photo below is the back side.
I wanted to use the top and bottom leftover scraps from last week's piece as the basis of this week's. Last week's scraps originally came from scraps from my Recycled Fence Series, which is recently finished new work.
To create this piece, I cut one 10" x 10" piece of grey pre-felted wool fleece, and one tan piece of the same size. I placed the grey on top of the tan, and needle punched it, turned it over, and repeatedly felted it at least 4 times per side, until it felt solidly felted.
Then I placed scraps from last week's piece on top of the tan side of the felt, and felted the off-white fleece sections only. I was careful not to felt the thin strips of stitched and painted cotton, because I always break a needle when I do that, and needles are very expensive to replace.
To attach the stitched/painted cotton scraps to the felt, I used my sewing machine and sewed a small zig-zag stitch around all of the edges of each strip. I REALLY like how the zigzag stitch blends the stitched fabric to the felt. If you saw it in real life you'd see everything fits together so nicely. It's hard to tell from these pictures.
Since my bobbin thread was white, you can see what the sewing looked like from the back, and also where I felted the off-wite fleece.
I then used a 6" square template to center the piece for my final design. I guess I'm in an asymmetrical mood this week. I traced the square with a pencil, and cut it to size.
You can see my 2008 weekly mixed media work (so far) on my website, and read about my process/progress here on my blog.
