This is the front side of my 31st Weekly Mixed Media piece this year. Below is the back side.
This is a Passion Vine. I had never seen this flower before, until a few weeks ago. Some friends had it growing on their deck, and I really liked it. I decided to it as my inspiration for this week's felted/mixed media piece, and also use my new shredding scissors when making part of it.
I cut two 10" x 10" pieces of green pre-felted wool fleece, and put one on top of the other. Then I cut eight white pre-felted pieces for the pedals, and rounded the edges on one end. I placed them in the center of the green square, rotating them around a tan pre-felted wool fleece circle, which was already placed on the green.
Then I cut a piece of purple pre-felted wool fleece, at least 3" by 5". (The piece shown above is longer than 5", but all I needed was 5".)
I used the shredding scissors to cut the center of the flower. Note that the scissors didn't do a very good job of cutting the fleece, but that's OK. It made an interesting cut, and the imperfections were fine.
I took 5" in length of the cut purple, and made a circle out of it, spreading the cut ends out as evenly as possible. I also added a few pieces of yellow pre-felted fleece in the center of the flower.
Then I slowly needle punched it from the top down, going over each section many times to felt it tightly. Notice how the "pedals" moved, as did everything else, but that's OK. I turned it over a few times and felted the green parts (only) from the other side. and felted all of the front some more.
This is what the back side looked like after felting.
When I was happy with the felting, I switched to my sewing machine. Using maroon thread. I started sewing stitches from the center of the flower, and sewed out about an inch, reversed direction to stitch back over the same line, and then rotated to repeat so all of the stitched radiated out of the center. Then I repeated it again using white thread, sewing the lines about 2" long.
Using a 6" square template, I chose the section of my design to crop, traced it with a pencil, and trimmed 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.
