The book I am referencing is Filz Geschichten by Annette Quentin-Stoll und Robert Quentin. MaroVerlag is possibly the publisher and everything in it is in german. Yay, Google Translate!

This project creates 9 samples; all done very simply with little tweaks that advance from one sample to the next.  I read them all, put the book down and then used my own methods, my knowledge of resists and prefelts and made my own samples. I added buttons, free motion quilting and other decorative stitching.

Cool, huh?!

Well, that was last year. This year, I returned to the original book, re-translated it and was again in awe with how 9 little projects were made and advanced. I had been inspired, but I also missed the point. This little project had a lot to teach and was enough completely as is. I'm struggling to find the right words, so here it is, everything I love about felting in one little package. Will make a great gift too.

By Carolyn Steele Lane
Needle felting
I had created my first dinosaur way back in February 2017. I used wire in the arms/fingers only, keeping the arm wires joined and built the wool body in the middle (as opposed to making two separate arms and sticking them into the body).

Last fall, Elisabeth Weigand kindly commissioned one like it for her sister in Germany, so I got to make another! 
I stayed away from wire this time, though last fall seems so long ago, I can't quite remember. I did use a string jointed technique to attach the arms and legs. Simply sewed from inner leg to outer, back through, through body and into second leg and back and forth a few times. If done right, the leg will move on a joint.  Any dimples created can be covered up with more wool.

One of the biggest decisions of a project is size or proportion. All this has been done freehand. I much prefer sizing as I go rather than creating a complete wire frame of the whole project at the start. That's just me. Learning to draw has helped and I've always been spatially aware, except now I'm probably less exacting. I've often start with a head  or a body part that is important to that character such as the claws on this one. The rest is built to fit or adjustments are made as I go and exaggeration is allowed. And like any story book, the character starts making demands such as a flower rather than a heart or sometimes coffee.

I love how this new dinosaur looks so completely different than the first one and shows my work improving.

By Carolyn Steele Lane
Needle felting and wet felting

My daughter asked me to make a couple gifts for her cousins, which led to us watching many episodes of Futurama over Christmas. The Piranha plant from Super Mario, I know well from playing quite a few frustrating video games when the kids were younger. Back when you couldn't save your level or yourself for that matter. I love how I am influenced by my kids. When I can catch their excitement and create something I wouldn't have otherwise.

Introducing Nibbler from Futurama and The Piranha plant from Super Mario fame!

Nibbler's cape is from store bought felt. His diaper was made from quilt batting. I had tried to give him a big, cute butt 'cause its funny, but it didn't fit his character and body type and plus, the diaper. So I do go back and forth with my ideas and rework areas to make it better- even his teeth were cut down and reshaped. It's a good thing wool is forgiving.

The Piranha plant is mostly needle felted, but I wet felted the leaves, machine stitched the veins and stitched onto the stem. The stem is made of pipe cleaners, wrapped in wool and carefully needle felted. I sometimes wet felt the stem as well to make it smoother and tighter, but didn't this time.

Enjoy!

Felted pieces by Nicola Hanna
Created last fall as gifts for family members.

I call this piece “Prairie Sky”, it is wet and needle felted. It was fun to play with the colours for the sky, using different kinds of material like roving yarn and dyed sheep locks.
The old cabin was a bit of a challenge for me in regards to getting definition and shading.

For “Yukon Mountain Valley in Fall” I used the same techniques and similar materials. The challenge for me always is to get definition and dimension - it is an inspiring process.

"Winter Light" by Bronwen Duncan

The inspiration for this is the Yukon December late afternoon light that is so warm-tinged in the absolute cold. This was very loosely based on a hike I did last December. The challenge of the project was to get the fox's face right; allowing the shadows to basically take over, and figuring out how the shadows work around the bottom of a tree. A mixture of wet-felting and needle-felting.

"Poppies" by Bronwen Duncan

The inspiration for this project came from how poppies are so incredibly graceful and happy. The challenge was how to make the petals of a poppy not seem very heavy and wooly, but have some lightness to them. This was the first felt picture I've done where I did not add any further wool after I wet-felted - I just tidied up outlines with the needle.

"Spring" by Bronwen Duncan

The inspiration for this came from the poem by Mary Oliver of the same name which has long haunted me. 
The challenges in this project were to get the trees to meld into the foreground, and to get the green grassy pieces to stay put (I'd cut them from a prefelt and so some of the fibres were so short they just wanted to bounce around). I was very pleased with how the trees seem to be dancing and as my English cousin noted: "The bear's eyes gaze on us rather than at us" (not quite sure how I did that!)
A mixture of wet felting and needle felting.

by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
    a black bear
      has just risen from sleep
         and is staring

down the mountain.
    All night
      in the brisk and shallow restlessness
         of early spring

I think of her,
    her four black fists
      flicking the gravel,
         her tongue

like a red fire
    touching the grass,
      the cold water.
         There is only one question:

how to love this world.
    I think of her
      rising
         like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
    the silence
      of the trees.
         Whatever else

my life is
    with its poems
      and its music
         and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
    coming
      down the mountain,
         breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her--
    her white teeth,
      her wordlessness,
         her perfect love.

After my big effort with weaving towels, I've found it hard to switch to wet felting and face all the big ideas I have. So I simplified and stuck to a comfortable pattern that I've made several times before - a circular resist - and added a little twist from elsewhere.

I have shared this link with a few fetters in our group: https://sherstival.ru/zapis/ . Its a Russian site that I seem to be able to display in english on my phone, but not my browser. The videos are in Russian as well, but you can still fast forward to the demos and follow along. The March 27 video has a demonstration on making thin leaves felted with silk fiber lines or thread. 

So that encouraged me to make a vessel with 4 layers of light grey corriedale fibre, lightly add purple fibre to the base, and decorate the top of the vessel with purple silk and some purple rayon thread I had on hand.

I have also been collecting gotland fleece and decided to wash up a bit of it and put it into a vessel. I used two layers of Corriedale wool roving and then for the next two layers, mixed the same corriedale in with some gotland that I had carded. I was impressed how well this vessel felted. And then I got carried away adding some of the locks I had just cleaned. Its beautiful stuff and so soft.

I hope you enjoy some more photos of these two vessels. Looking forward to seeing what everyone else is doing to keep sane during these strange times.

Stay well!

Carolyn Steele Lane