a life of felt - Angela Barrow » low relief

Low Relief Workshop

angela — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 06:21:04 +0000

Another good day on Saturday when we looked at creating felt with low relief. There are a number of ways to create low relief including; manipulating the felt with pleats, building the layers with pre-felts to create depth, cutting back and including items like heavy string between the layers.

It gives really lovely effects to your work as can be seen above. The muffin of the day was cherry and chocolate chip which I’m not sure worked terribly well. Cherry nice, chocolate chip nice, combined – hmmm not so sure.

On request

angela — Sun, 30 May 2010 16:55:23 +0000

I was commissioned to create three vegetable pictures. They’ll be used in a research laboratory which works with children looking at how we can get them to eat more veg. I know my own daughter goes on and off different vegetables and fruit although overall she’s pretty good about everything except green salad. I usually substitute: raw white cabbage for the lettuce, red peppers for the tomatoes and peas instead of cucumber. It seems to work okay. Before they go off to their new home I wanted to show you the pictures.

I know they’ve used bright wall paint in the lab and I wanted to provide equally bright pictures with the vegetables in forms the children would recognise. Each picture has an element of low relief. Nothing too exaggerated or it’d be difficult to frame them. I hope they’ll be liked.

Felting a tree

angela — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:13:02 +0000

You may remember me rambling on about items I find when out walking and I did mention some pine cones I’d found. In addition, I came across some mini cones and these have inspired me to make a tree picture. Ages ago I’d made two of the felted tails below to go in a project and then changed my mind and put them in my bit bag. I thought they’d make the perfect basis for the tree.

Continuing the recycling theme I carded the fibres from my bit bag, using up all the old greens with a little purple, brown and grey added. I was thinking about heather moors when I was doing this. You can see that I’ve chopped the tails up and rearranged them to make the tree.

You can see that in order to join the bits of tree together you need to cut on an angle to enable you to fit them together with no gaps. I’ve joined them quite crudely as I’ll be covering the tree with some more fibres and you won’t see stitching or joins. I had the idea of adding more low relief at the bottom of the picture and chopped up other discarded felt rolls and felt balls which I embedded in the middle of the fibres. You won’t see them but they will give the impression of boulders under the grass.

I carded different browns, grey, black, purple and green fibres to cover the tree. I allowed the original colour to show through in places as I think it adds to the depth. You can see that I’ve also gone over the whole tree with a felting needle to make sure that I really got the definition I was after. I then wet felted again.

The cones are attached by a few couching stitches. As they’re quite brittle and therefore fragile I don’t think they’ll last for ever on this piece but it’ll still look good long after they’ve gone. It’s strange, I wasn’t expecting to like this tree so much but it’s one of the items I like most in my recent work.