Painting with wool - dry and wet

the journey has begun....

Today we tried our hands on the delicate dry painting with wool layering technique. It is an unusual journey for most even experienced felters to find their ways with the fine fibre making transparent in the fairytale style technique. We took some of Laryna's paintings of fairies, angels and gnomes, all of which play with the wholeness of the rainbow circle and let people choose their rainbow circle, and then started with laying fine amounts of fibre overlapping and building up from fine to strong.

An hour or two is far too short for to build up a really in depth picture like this one here

Sleeping Beauty ~ from http://www.märchenwollbilder.de/

and it does need grown-up patience - like with so much of real craft - to create the delicate depth that takes one's breath away when working pictures with wool. One can use the needle also very gently to invite the fibres as it were to stay in places, especially when it comes to finer features. And one does need an indepth frame like Caroline used last year when doing her finely shaped reconstruction of a cell dividing

Today we did not have a frame to display and mainly cotton thermo lining as fluffy backing for the pictures - so some homework was required afterwards for some makers.
Here is a good example how one art card (top right) of gnomies round a fire inspired both a dry felt (the one with the white background)  and a wet felt picture (the one on the blue felt)

And the action of wetfelting is certainly most versatile and quickly rewarding for children - so today we used table as well as the firm stage floor to get going!

And Andrew's dragon made a journey from preparing on the white background (cotton, that means it can not be wet felted through), to being transferred to the blue wool prefelt

and then getting worked hard in rolling and rinsing to this

as the basis for a picture, or bag?

More images of today on our album from this picture onward.

The ways and stages of transformation a wool picture can go through are pretty amazing and very heartily satisfying!