What I did with Tree Bark - Felting

When I posted the picture of the tree bark I thought I really wanted to do something with the idea but I wanted to use completely different colours and I wanted to use felting as the technique with some hand embroidery. I felted pieces of hand dyed muslin (cheese cloth) into the wool top (bought already dyed), some had been machine embroidered before felting. Others were just the dyed fabric. i also cut up other pieces of pre felted muslin and embroidered them onto the completed piece of felting. The picture on the right shows pieces of felt I made that I then joined together to make one larger piece of felting. The left hand picture is the finished piece after I joined the pieces of felt together and then hand embroidered it with running stitches.

Embellished Felt and Machine Embroidery

This is a sample I have been experiementing with. I made a piece of felt with the embellisher and then I cut it up and placed some pieces between two pieces of gold netting and other pieces on top of the gold netting. After this I free machine embroidered on top. I showed it to Doreen of Creative Meanderings and she said I should show it on my blog so here it is. The first picture is the back of the work and the second more brightly coloured picture is the front. I don't think the pictures show the stitching very well . I am not sure what I will do with it yet, if anything.

Inspirations from Trees and Coffee

Coffee
I made myself an iced coffee on a very hot day a couple of weeks back. To make sure it was really cold I put the coffee in the glass in the freezer only to discover I left it too long and it started to freeze. After adding the milk it formed these lovely frozen pieces of coffee on top. I thought it was worth a picture and in fact I have been thinking about how to use it in some artwork.

Trees

Out working one day with the camera (a fairly rare event because I always to forget to take it)
I found these two trees with such wonderful bark that I couldn't resist a photo for inspiration.

Paper Arts - Picture to decorate a card front

This is a piece of cartridge paper on which I painted using water colour paints
This is the same piece of paper with nappy liner (it has been coloured using glitter shiva sticks) and then heated so it will adhere to the surface of the paper
This is the final piece after stamping, embossing and using the heat gun.
These are the products I used to enhance the surface

Felting and Dying

I have been experimenting with dying fabric - this is silk chiffon which I felted after the dying process was complete. I dyed the piece of fabric using the cramb jar method and only two dye colours - a basic yellow and magenta. After dying I used wool tops to felt it using the nuno felting method (although I did not leave any unfelted fabric as is often done). This piece of fabric was completely covered on the back with wool tops for felting and as a result the front surface is totally wrinkly as in nuno.

Cramb Jar Dying method

Place some dye at the bottom of a jar, place dry fabric on top and then drop the other colour on top of the fabric, or around the sides., depending on what you are trying to achieve. Cover gently with water. I also add soda ash water before leaving overnight.