large needle felt landscape and thick cuff of merino and tencel

Experiment....

When I was first learning needle felting, I used some repurposed wool sweaters that I had fulled in the washer as a backing . I wanted to see if I would get a different result using the merino roving as backing instead .

Process...

I laid down several strips of black merino roving west to east and slightly over lapping . I then covered those with a thinner layer going north to south . I needled these together lightly, flipping the whole thing several times . After that compressed about half the depth, I began laying on the blue sky, brown hills, green valley and needled this together . I added some bright mohair for the flowers . Not a lot of detailing in this as I wasn't sure any of this would work .

After getting my sky laid down, I decided it was a bit to intensely blue and looked more like water then sky, so I added a blend of darker blues, whites and blacks to represent storm clouds . My color blending isn't great as I was using some pet brushes for this instead of carding paddles .

Getting the roving to felt...

I began by using a large 8 needle tool which took about two hours and then went over the whole thing inch by inch with a single needle to tighten things up . I left the edges a bit looser to eventually attach to a wool backing .

Ok...that took about a minute to describe and 10 hours to do .

Effect....

It defiantly has a different look then felting it to another fabric bit I think the later allows more time for doing detailing while the former takes hours just to get the bottom layer of merino to felt . It's also more difficult to not get the black merino poking through the top layer which looks interesting in the mountains and hills but not so great in a blue sky .

I used the same technique doing the cuff . This one is much thicker and tighter felted then the other cuffs I've made . It probably wouldn't appeal to many people but it did work for shaping into a solid piece .