Teri | Teri Berry Textiles

The lovely ladies at the Felting and Fiber Studio have just posted the first challenge for 2016. This year the challenges will focus on different techniques, for Q1 the technique is resists…. more info can be found on their site here.

I use resists in almost all of my felt work so making a simple vessel, bag or applying a cracked mud design to a piece feels a bit like cheating, this is meant to be a challenge after all.

I have been an admirer of Australian felt artist, Sue Smorthwaite’s work since I met her on a workshop with Fiona Duthie last year, when thinking about this challenge my thoughts kept returning to this piece in particular.

Sue Smorthwaite – Weighted Untruths

So, interlocking chains were high on my wish list for this piece. I settled on a hat and started sketching ideas and opted for this version (apologies for the scruffy sketch, this was just me jotting down ideas).

Sue appears to have stuffed the links of her chains, while I can do that for the rings that rest on the head, I fear stuffing the dangling rings will make it too heavy so will need to find an alternative solution, either fulling the felt so that it is stiff enough to hold the ring shape or applying some fabric stiffener. I expect I will need a combination of the two.

Cutting out the resists:

Covering with wool and adding some decoration to make the “chains” appear to be rusty:

This piece is already proving to be a little argumentative, the links that should remain loose and moveable keep trying to felt to each other and the rings that I need to felt together are doing their best to resist felting.

What do you have in mind for your challenge piece?

Happy 2016 and welcome to my new site! 🙂

Santa Claus brought me a most unusual gift this year…. my own domain name and access to a server. Consequently I have spent much of the Christmas holidays trying to set up the new site and migrate all my blogger posts over. I think my personal tech support, sat on the couch next to me, is already thinking this wasn’t such a clever gift… I really don’t get html, not even on the most basic level, while he speaks it so fluently he can’t seem to grasp that I don’t, our recent conversations must look like what you would expect if aliens landed on Earth and tried to communicate with us 🙁

Anyway, after much cursing and Googling (I only needed rescuing once, after I changed some html text and made the whole site inoperable), I seem to have all the posts transferred and there are just things like the contact widget and blogroll to set up. Then the fun bit, working out what new features WordPress offers, can start 🙂

If you like following this blog, please change the URL in your blog roll to http://www.teriberry.com or use the sign up for email alerts widget on the left. If you subscribe to “receive posts by email” please leave a comment letting me know how you find it, I’m concerned that the widget I installed is incredibly slow.

I will continue to post to both blogs for the next couple of weeks but will stop posting in blogger in February.

In between my cursing and ranting about how unintuitive website building software is I have been making a couple of bags. Mostly as an excuse to use some of Zara’s lovely Gotland locks…