meadows on my table

I'll be holding a felting workshop in a few weeks, teaching some simple wool "painting" techniques.  My last felting class was cancelled due to weather so while I was working up this little example last night I was ignoring the 8 new inches of snow on my porch.  I refused to look.  Kind of the visual equivalent of sticking my fingers in my ears and saying "lalala I can't hear you!"

Surely, by May we'll have spring.

'Til then, I have flower-filled meadows on my table.

Happy Thursday, all.

Quadrat piece completed

Yay!  It's completed!

This is the needle-felted piece I've been working on.  Inspired by a call for art at the resident's gallery in the Franklin Arts Center where I work.  The theme is work that is exactly 12" x 12", and since mine is not an exacting nature, I had to ponder how I might be able to fit that requirement.  It wasn't until I started poking at some wool that I decided that I wanted to do a piece reflecting a portion of the landscape in my mind.  Like a quadrat, a tool scientists use to isolate a standard unit for study.

Though this scene is plucked from my imagination, it definitely has its roots in reality.  For example, my fungus here is influenced by the orange peel fungus by the duck pond in my backyard.

A sprouting plant with downy leaves is similar to the mullein by the driveway.

Waxed thread becomes my take on sporophytes that dot our back woods.

Pebbles and sprouting grasses atop mounds of moss and earth.

And pebbles, plucked from lakeshores, naturally.

This was a really satisfying piece to work on, especially since it allowed me to conjure up images of greenness in this otherwise winter-white landscape.

The frame was made from some planks I had in my workshop.  This piece hangs on the wall and I could see myself doing a whole series of these.  Hmm...

'Quadrat'

2014

12" x 12"

needle-felted wool, cotton thread

by Lisa Jordan