Some felt flowers

Yesterday evening I had a cold. I have a cold today, for that matter. Being a charitable sort of person, I decided not to spread it around my martial arts group (especially as two of them work at the hospital - way to let the viruses roam around the community!), and so spent the evening at home. I made flowers out of felt.

I have come to a couple of conclusions. I don't think that I will ever be able to make felt flowers quickly, and should probably just aim to be efficient. I am also not keen on wet felting - you don't get to see the progress you are making, and it takes a lot of effort. I shall try unsuccessfully to see whether wet felting will occur in the dishwasher, and then look at different ways of making needle felting work for me, I think.

Yesterday, I made a cherry blossom and started to make a lily. The cherry blossom is OK - it needs a bit of tidying up. I don't know how good the lily is, as I have only felted half of its petals; I imagine that it will be OK.

Having expected to have a really enjoyable evening doing practically nothing, I actually felt a bit bored. Very frustrating! Perhaps it is because (as evidenced by my recent blog entries) I am a bit boring. I think that perhaps I ought to schedule a few more commitments so that I can miss more things and thus enjoy my free time more. OK, so I was missing martial arts, but I think that perhaps I believed in my excuse a bit too much.

Photos of the felting to follow, assuming I manage to post them. Please do not hold your breath!

Also, more interesting posts to follow. Again, holding of breath would not be advisable.

Felt flowers

This evening I have a bit of free time! Hooray. I mean, it's not entirely free as I have to get the house a bit tidier so that we can fit in a few friends staying overnight on Saturday for HWSNBN's birthday, but I will have a bit of space to sit and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer while creating flowers out of felt. I am going to have a go at making pretty ones which I can sell on Etsy. I don't yet know whether or not I have this capability, and probably won't be too disappointed if I do not, but I figure that it's worth a go.

I recently made a rose for Rose, and it turned out quite well in my humble opinion. The stem took forever, and was not entirely anatomically correct (leaves don't appear to go on the stem on which the flower grows; they seem to prefer stems coming off that stem. Also, its internals were made of wire and wool; real stem internals have tubes for moving water and nutrients around. I am less concerned about the second inaccuracy than the first); next time I may well end up with a shorter stem. Perhaps I will also make hair clips and hairbands. Even brooches may be an option.

My current project is a viola. As in the flower, not the musical instrument. It is a tiny bit more hefty than I originally planned - I was thinking that a viola was about the same size as a pansy (which it is not - violas are tiny), and I think that I had an exaggerated petal size in my head when I planned the first petal. I am going to have to consider future flowers more carefully! The rose was a good size (about what I was aiming for - perhaps a tiny bit on the little size, but not significantly so), but the viola is a leviathan of a thing.

I have also resolved to put some photographs up. To this end, I shall keep a usb cable in the living room to facilitate the transfer of images. We shall see how effective this resolve turns out to be.

Have a great evening (or whatever it is that you are about to have)!