Category Archives: challenge

Q4 Challenge and Winkworth Arboretum

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The final Felting and Fiber Studio Form challenge for this year centres around tone and shade, mixing white and black with a single colour. Although I had a small hand in creating this challenge I know I am going to find it difficult to retrain myself to a single colour. I can’t resist the drama created by placing complimentary colours next to each other.

Last weekend we paid a trip to Winkworth Arboretum, a National Trust property just south of Godalming in Surrey, a beautiful place, especially with all the trees just starting to turn red and gold, and definitely worth the excursion if you are an NT member. These are just a few of the photos I took.

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I am finding myself strangely drawn to the last image, I think it is the feeling that path is inviting the viewer to some unseen destination.

Initially I had an idea to create a triptych wall hanging depicting a woodland scene with one panel each of yellow, orange and crimson but I am already wandering off on another tangent. I might still come back to that idea though as I still think it has “legs”.After having a play with the colour tools in GIMP (a free photo-editing software that is similar to Photoshop), these were the front-runners:

I quite like the last one which is more of a grey-scale with the greens added back in, although the third image down, also has merit, that one is essentially a posterised version of the last image but I am finding it looks like there is snow on the ground while the trees are in leaf. The greens are also showing splashes of blue and yellow rather than just shades and tones.

Challenge Cheat

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This quarter’s challenge from the felting and fibre studio was to dye or blend our colours to match samples from a colour pallet generator. I only had an afternoon this weekend for felting so decided to bend the rules a little. I found a photo I liked in Pinterest and plugged it into a colour pallet generator with this result:

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Instead of blending / dyeing my own colours, I rummaged through my wool stash for the closest colours I could find to pallet of colours above:

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I decided to make something small, a phone case for an iphone I haven’t even bought yet. I know, I’m a little bit mad but when I get an idea in my head I rarely have the patience to be sensible.

Keeping to the flower theme of the original photo, I created a resist based on phone dimensions I found on the web and started laying out my wools and found some scarlet cotton in my scrap bag along with some pieces of hand-dyed prefelt that I thought would work well with this colour pallet (another deviation from the challenge brief).

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This is the nearly finished case, I just need to trim the pocket where the phone will sit, but I will wait for the phone to arrive before I do that final step, even I’m not that brave/stupid/reckless (delete as appropriate).

Here it is drying (front and back):

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I’m already thinking about adding some machine embroidery to the front flap….