It’s been such a long time since I wrote a post just about crafty endeavours, so I figured this is long overdue. That and the fact it’s been sitting in my pending posts list since June last year! Without further ado, here’s my first foray into felting under the tutelage of my friend V. (Sorry it’s taken so terribly long to write up V!).

Let’s turn the clock back to December 2016 when we were the lucky recipients of this beautiful hand felted snowdrop card. It had been made by our friend V who I had often had long chats about all things crafty with. She had mentioned that she did a bit of felting but until I received this gorgeous card, I hadn’t seen any of her work.

She invited me to come to her place and have a go myself – I couldn’t say no to that could I?

V asked me to come with an idea for a picture in mind, it had to be Gibraltar didn’t it? I had a huge range of colours to chose from before beginning…

The first job was to layer up the fibres of white wool vertically and horizontally across a sheet of bubble wrap to form a base.

Once about three layers were laid out, I pulled thin amounts of yarn fibres in various shades of blue to form the basic background of the picture.

In order to get the fibres to lie flat, we combed the yarn between two large paddle hairbrushes.

Slowly the shape of the Rock began to emerge.

Once the rough shape was in place, it was time to get felting. Hot soapy water was splashed onto the picture…

… before enveloping the whole thing with bubble wrap and rubbing. And there was a whole lot of rubbing involved to try and get the fibres to ‘knit’ together.

The image had changed a bit after this.

Then it was time to peel off the felted picture and get ready to squeeze the water out.

To do this, we laid it on an off cut of a bamboo blind, then rolled it up.

We rolled and rolled to squeeze the soapy water out and to further bind the fibres together.

Then it was time for a bit of throwing practice. It was a good workout this felting business! Splat into the kitchen sink time and time again!!

It was then pegged out to dry. The base was finished, ready to reconvene on another day to embellish it further and add more details.

Inspired by this photo I took on a trip out into the Bay of Gibraltar on a dolphin trip, I decided to attempt to add a boat to my picture. Some of the details were added using a barbed felting needle to add yarn fibres to the background picture.

Once the yacht and a few tower blocks were added, I got the sewing machine out.

So that was my machine embroidery complete, now it was time for a bit of hand stitched embellishments.

Finally, a whole year after I began this picture, the time had come to finish it!

Are you ready? Drum roll please……

Ta-dah!

And here it is on the wall…

Thank you so much V for your expert tutelage…. looks like I have another hobby!!

Perhaps next time it won’t take a year to finish it!!