INTO THE RABBIT HOLE

Start at the beginning and when you get to the end... 


I forget what the theme was supposed to be for this piece. I'm pretty sure it was still life. I started a one [wo]man rebellion on the matter. I don't much like set projects and I knew I had my interview for university coming up so I needed something more textile based in my folio, and so my tutors were basically ignored and I decided to do my own thing- whatever that is!

This all started because of the Twist Fibre shop in Newburgh. It's not big enough to swing a cat in but I could spend half my day and all<\b> of my (pretty much non existant) money in! So, I went there for a quick visit one day and came out with a random selection of wools, craft kits and MASSIVE STABBY NEEDLES. Yeah, they appealed to me a bit too much.

Basically... needle felting- I'd never tried it before and it looked like it could be fun. So I decided to do a wee bit experimenting with it, and it is pretty boss. Stabbing things is surprisingly theraputic :)

Anyway, I am getting ahead of myself! I decided for my art piece I was going to do an Alice's Adventures in Wonderland theme. Why? Because I love it. Not in an "OMG JONNY DEPP AND TIM BURTON" type way. No, I actually love it. Children's books are one of my guilty pleasures. Me and Peter Pan, we're pretty tight.

Initially I wanted to make a necklace out of wire and with charms on it. Y'know... just like all the things in the shops right now. That went out the window because, apart from anything else, I have no idea about enameling haha. Ahh dear. I am no jewellery maker, clearly.

So, rambling aside, I decided to go with the felting-a-necklace masterplan. I started with making beads using wool fibres, warm water and soap. Easy peasy! Made it into a simple necklace- being beautifully modelled by some random scene kid I found in the street :P

After that... well... it's all rather stabby-stab and that. I looked at the original illustrations from the books and decided I wanted to make a tree. This was all needle felted with lots of different colours of wool overlapping. I then made the base of the necklace from black and white patchwork (supposed to be representational of the chess board)... followed by- yes - more stabby stab needle felting of "grass". This is actually a fairly quick process. I thought it would take ages but it is pretty quick and effective :)

The rest of the necklace was pretty straightforward. I had load of ideas of what I wanted to put on it, but it all ended up way too cluttered so I kept it pretty simple. Probably a good thing. I think it sorta turned out looking like a bib. A very nice bib, but a bib nonetheless. For a first attempt I don't think it turned out that badly though!


See, the scene kid is back showing you how it's done ;) 

...stop.