January 2016 - Jane Mercer Felt Artist

Taking my time

I am coming to realize that it can take me a very long time to finished a felted piece. In July 2015 I made a piece based on some photographs I had taken in 2014. The inspiration was wet lichen covered rocks. Then I looked at this felted piece and thought what on earth will I do with this now ! For those of you who read this blog , might remember I eventually cut it up. A radical move , but I still could not finish it ! I loved the dark brown Masham surround and wanted to find away to bring it all together. So I took it to a master class with Artybird and asked ," what shall I do now". Various suggestions were made mostly involving bringing it together as a piece. I thought about this , alongside the original inspiration for the piece and suddenly…

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31/01/2016

Wet felting

New website and Blog is nearly ready

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19/01/2016

machine stitching / Wet felting

Finishing

I have had a good week , finishing, or at least seeing the way forward to finishing a number of pieces. I have got my sewing machine back in action and stitched these two brooches, they both remind me of ice . Out walking today there was lots of snow and ice at one of my favorite places Easedale tarn. I found some nice simple wooden frames in Hobbycraft which fit my stitched felt squares perfectly. I only bought two as a trial , but they are perfect , I will be back for more soon. I have also been hand stitching . This little beauty contains a vintage button and now has some lines of beads to finish it. All in all a good week , some wonderful walking and lots of felt finishing .

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17/01/2016

Artybird Carnforth / Wet felting

Alpaca

My use of alpaca to date has been as a yarn for texture. I like to do this as it takes up natural dyes slightly differently than wool adding both texture and shades simultaneously. You can see this in the madder dyed piece below , where the alpaca yarn is at the top and slightly lighter than the surrounding wool I was therefore interested to see how the fibre itself felted during a day this week at Artybird in Carnforth. The fibre I had to felt was one year old alpaca , the youngest and softest . It has less scales and less crimp than wool fibre. Perhaps it would be very hard to felt. With four thin layers laid out I just used my normal techniques and only cold water and found I could easily and quickly make a small sample. I had embellished the piece with…

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10/01/2016

Artybird Carnforth / Wet felting

How to restart ?

Well after a successful move back to the UK , followed by two weeks unpacking , and a family Christmas and New Year, I need to start felting again. In truth we are far from unpacked but the essentials are sorted and now is mostly just a question of time before some modifications to the house can be organized and its dry enough to tackle the jungle of the garden I have temporarily installed my sewing machine on a small table in the study and put a felting table in the conservatory so nothing is stopping me - except I am not sure what to do ! Before I left the Netherlands I put in my pop up felting studio, some jewellery making partial felt and some beads , but I am not inspired to make any jewellery right now. I have in my stash of fibres some beautiful fibres that…

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03/01/2016