Summer Felting Class

  This summer I treated myself to a week long class taught by Lisa Klakulak at the Mendocino Art Center: Compositions In the Felt Medium.  This was my fifth class with her, and as in years past, it was amazing, I always learn so much from her!  Lisa is the artist behind Strongfelt, a body of art work that is truly original and of the highest quality, honestly the best felt I have yet to see.   If you aren't familiar with her work google Strongfelt to see what I'm going on about-it's so fun!  Lisa teaches classes around the world, mostly in the US, if you really want to educate yourself on how to make quality felt check out her teaching schedule.  I am not going to elaborate on how we developed the images or her technique, that's part of her livelihood!  I just want to share what I did......I was so jazzed by the results!
  She taught us how to create a very distinct image with defined lines.  Our first exercise was to draw a California poppy then to re-draw it in a way that we could recreate using felt.  Above right was my interpretation of the poppy I had and how I translated that to felt.  Below left is what it looked like after felting it. 



On the lower right is the poppy after I felted it to a background with some netting fused on it.

   One thing you will notice about Lisa's work is the intricate detail she gets using free motion embroidery with a machine.  We learned how to embellish our work and really make it pop using the machine.  Below is my poppy, felted, then the detail is the stitching using free motion embroidery.  I had so much fun doing this, it's mesmerizing once you get going!

After doing the poppy we were able to choose anything we wanted and try to translate it into felt.  I had a blue glass mason jar with me that was holding my granola, you can kind of see it on the left in the upper corner....out with the granola and I began sketching.  I wanted to try to capture the light reflecting off of it and some of the more subtle shaded details.  The photo on the left is my lay out before felting. 








 Here on the right I'm starting to stitch.  You can kind of see the different shades I was going for. 
Below is my finished blue glass mason jar.  I am so happy with it!  I just can't get over how much the stitching adds to the finished piece.....I feel a new obsession coming on......