Wolf in sheeps clothing ? or "when things go terribly wrong"

.....And this is where I left it yesterday . Not very encouraging to have something this unattractive after 8 hours of constant poking . but....

that is part of the good and bad aspect of needle felting . The bad part is that you have to spend hours to find out what is going to come out of the wool . Sometimes, what comes out is less then pleasing, but you have already invested hours . The good part of felting is that it is almost always possible to find some way to rescue the wool you invested, even if the time itself is lost . At the very least , the sculpture can be used as filler or a base for the next larger sculpture . Sometimes, it can be "saved" with just a few minor overlays and a 5 more hours of felting .

So, what went wrong...? Firstly, I did not have a clear vision of what I wanted to make . I actually like to felt this way, just vaguely shaping the wool until it starts to look like something familiar and then I add the details based on what it reminds me of . This is something I have been doing since I was a kid . I would take a piece of paper and draw some quick random lines and then look at it until faces and shapes popped out as "something familiar" , then I would darken certain lines and add the rest of the detail . I found this fun because the end result was always a surprise to me .

Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't . It's a bit risky but rewarding when it works because I feel like the wool is telling me what it wants to be...(I know, silly "New Age voodoo" to some, but that's how I roll .) Anyway, I never got a clear image of what this as going to be...head and snout shape remained vague in my mind . Was it heading towards bear, dinosaur, DooDoo bird ?

The other problem ,which is a silly mistake, is not paying attention to the color roving I was using . I had some batts that I thought looked brown but was more pinkish red and not particularly attractive . The end result would have been great if I wanted to make a road kill animal or something a hunter had already skinned but those are both to sad of images for me and I just refused to "go there" .....the dark side....(been there.... done that...moved in and got comfortable on the couch with a bag of chips but eventually woke up and ran away screaming ..."The Horror, The Horror".....) The world has enough horror with out my adding to it .

So...the only way I saw to recue the skinned animal was....give it a bit of fluff .


...and some cute ears......
and a big booty with a fluffy tail . I do still have to finish the arms and face but had no brown wool this morning . I haven't decided if I will change the face...I made the eyes to close and don't like the felted eyes I made anyway . SO...back to work, another few hours to try and get a bit of cute out of this guy .
I finally got my new chiffon for some more nuno felting . I am really interested to see how the pattern prints will look . The one on the left is a hand dyed vintage scarf I bought on ebay and I think it's gorgeous . The other two are new fabric that don't haverolled stitched edges, so I have to decide if I want to try that or just add the fiber to the edges and see what happens .