I love it when a project comes together! I feel like I’m on
the home stretch to completing my pond piece.
A couple of weeks (and blogs) ago I made a set of felted rocks of
mottled greens and brown that would feel right at home on a river bottom. I’m very pleased with how they turned
out. This was lily pad week, and the
flat lily pad leaves will define the surface of the water, shading the spawning
koi. I dug into one of my bins of green
fleece and pulled out several greens that I thought I could blend into a
realistic lily pad color. I got to cranking
with my handy drum carder and produced a color I’m very happy with.
The next step was to bend some used baling
wire into lily pad shapes and connected stems for support. The base of the lily pads lies behind the
actual weaving and allow the lily pad to extend forward and above the
fish. That leaves the fish to complete. Fortunately, Jacob needed a haircut on
Friday, which gave me a chance to start needle felting them. Of course I get strange looks at places like
the barbershop, but that’s never stopped me.
The real challenge is to take a stationary, felted fish and present it
as a living fish under the water.
I want
the art piece to capture a snapshot of the movement of the fish, so I’m building
curves into the bodies that I’ll build on as the fish come together. I anticipate using bright orange, black and
white colors to make two fish that really stand out against he somewhat drab
colors of the underwater scene.
This week I launched into some of my Christmas shopping, and
I found myself scouring Big Lots for some silly gifts. I noticed they had a big bottle of turmeric for
99 cents! Don’t they know how valuable
that is for dyeing?
Of course I bought a
jar, but I didn’t anticipate using it this week. I’m also working on a weaving that will feature
Mexican sunflowers, and I calculated that I need around 100 petals for my
composition. That will be a tedious
task, but it also means I need to create the green pedicels that display the
leaves. I pulled out my box of felted
balls for the starting substrate, but I only had teal balls in hand. Rather than creating a bunch more I tried
overdyeing with turmeric. A quick online
search gave me the skeleton for a procedure.
I created a paste with two tablespoons of turmeric, to which I added a
half cup of vinegar and two quarts of water in a dye pot and set it to
boil. I popped in my wetted teal felt
balls, and within five minutes they were a beautiful green! It was so successful I went straight to my
store of teal yarn skeins and used the yellow dye in the turmeric to convert
them to a very attractive and useful green.
Let’s just say that in the end I used up the entire jar of turmeric and
have five skeins of cotton and wool yarns.
This time of year is also when I start to hear about the
applications I made for art fairs. My first
show will be the Ridgeland Art Fair in Mississippi in early April. I’m excited to trek down there and be able to
stay with family.
This week was a big milestone as my sweetie-pie turned sixty. He didn’t want a big to-do, so we just had a
crackers and cheese dinner in front of the fire with a nice bottle of wine
(thanks Steve and Linda Scott!).
Yes,
there was pie—thank you Gwen Witten for her famous derby pie, which was just
delightful. It goes well with wine. Who knew?
And thank you Cindy Creek, for asking Jim when there would be another
fruit pie. That’s exactly what I was
wondering!
Until next week,
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