HAPPY NEW YEAR to you all!
These precious few days between Christmas and New Year give everyone an opportunity to relax and take stock, count blessings and look forward to what the New Year promises! It gave me a chance to catch up on a particular project I'd begun several weeks ago (see Part 1)...
"Underwater Mosaic" the Brading community project set a challenge for each participant to take a section of Pat Clarke's fantasy picture and reproduce it in any craft or medium. The finished panels will be reassembled into three completed pictures which will be on permanent display at the Brading Roman Villa.
I'd been given a lovely central panel with some great colour & detail and set out by making an enlarged B&W pattern to work from, bearing in mind that the felt will shrink and the finished felted piece had to be stretched around a wooden base.
I made a series of coloured pre-felts, using paper templates to cut out the main shapes and felted these onto a black felt backing.
It was important to keep all the main shapes and colours as close to the original picture as possible as they would need to match up with the surrounding panels when placed back together.
The "Underwater Mosaic" is perfect for this project - but there's a lot going on! The painting is linked with coloured swirls which overlap and weave under and over, so there is an order in placing the layers. I made paper templates for the swirls and cut these shapes from commercial felt.
Before attaching them I needle felted the details on the fish and couldn't resist playing around with some decoration. I was so pleased to find the perfect fish button eye!
Then I had fun machine stitching all the swirling layers in place and used more stitching to enhance the movement and texture…
Finally, adding the beads and textures! Not being much of a hand-sewer or beader I must admit to gluing most of this decoration in place...
But it's not all secure as the felt panel now needs to be attached to its base. I'm going to wait to see how it fits together with the other panels before completely finishing it, especially around the edges where the joins need to match, and I may add some hand stitching too...
When we all meet up in a few weeks time there will be a total of 27 panels. No one knows what the other finished panels look like yet and it’s going to be really interesting to see how the new "mosaic" all fits back together again!
It's all very exciting...