May

It is June 1st, so it is time to reveal the May vessel!

I conceived of the idea for May early in the month but just never got around to doing the vessel until just the other day.

When felting with a flat pattern, which is how I make my vessels, you have to be very careful about how you work the edges. If you rub too hard, too quickly, you can end up with something that looks like Saturn, with a rim around the center instead of a smooth, round form. I thought that I would take this idea and push it a little.

Here is the beginning. I started by laying out what would be the bottom and adding a piece of bubble wrap into which I had cut a circle. This was laid down and a rim of fleece was added to make what would hopefully be a ruffle. The flat pattern was then put down and more fleece added.

Then more layers of bubble wrap and more fleece. You can see that there are quite a few layers here!

I wet everything down and felted. And felted. And rubbed. And felted. And so on and so on and so on...... There were a few areas that burst their seams and required some patching. And more felting.

Here is the final vessel. I will be honest in saying that it was not quite what I was expecting. I was hoping that it would end up being taller and the ruffles a little more...well...ruffly!

I was hoping to get something reminiscent of a Spanish dancer and ended up with a sumo wrestler playing dress up.

I think that this is an idea that wants to be revisited in the future.

Disappointing

I am sorry to have been so silent lately in terms of my Felted Vessel Project, but it turns out that March is an abject failure. Well, maybe I should be quite so harsh. I did learn a lot. Isn't that usually the way though.

If you remember (it was so long ago in time, but only a few posts) March was inspired by seeing street lights at night from an airplane. This necessitated finding streets upon which to set some lights.

Google maps came to the rescue. I started in Ottawa and "flew" towards Montreal ( the one place even I recognised from the air) and stopped when I found a particularly pleasing arrangement of streets. Just as I had no idea what towns I was flying over, I have no idea of the name of the particular town that I used. A print out and a couple of enlargements later, I had my streets. I had to do a bit of creative rearrangement to make a flat town fit on a curved surface, but through diligent application of scissors, managed to come up with a pleasing arrangement.

Through trial and error, I decided that the best way to mark out my town was to lay "lights" along the streets, and some how mark them.

preparation of pattern pieces

Enter the tiny hole punch (1/8th of and inch) and dressmakers chalk.

Patterns, chalk, and holes

Next came the punching. Hundreds of little holes. To punch effectively, I put a dowel into the vice, the vessel onto the dowel, and with my trusty hammer, beat the thing into submission.

Punching holes like nobody's business

After a while, the center of the dowel would be so chewed up as to not actually work as an effective brace against which to punch, so I also had to saw the end off the dowel several times.  Actually, this was a job that I pawned off on my wonderful husband.

A pooped punch pole

I was left with a bunch of small felt plugs. Every 5 or 6 holes, I would have to stop pounding and dig the plugs out of my punch. I ended up buying a couple of more punches, which turned out to be a good thing because I damaged my first punch a short while later.

Doughnut holes

and the doughnut

Next, I started to stitch the beads in. This in itself was a trial. I had finished the punching the night before I, my mother, and my friend Sarah were scheduled to leave for a Fibre Arts Retreat in Nova Scotia. The drive was about 5 hours and I felt safe that between going and coming home, I would have enough time to stitch my vessel. Not to mention that there would be time to stitch when I was not spinning, eating, etc.

I was right. I had plenty of time to stitch. I thought that I might not have enough beads so before we left, I ran to the store and found some more gold beads. What I didn't figure was that the beads were a slightly different gold. Not much of a difference, but enough of a difference that I couldn't use them.
If I had been at home, I could have taken the beads out of my trial piece, or run back to the store to see if I could find the right gold colour. As it was, I ripped the beads out and started to stitch with the new beads. I managed to get most of the stitching finished on the drive home (thanks Mamoo for driving!)

Finished....or is it?

Beads all in, and all of the same colour, it was done, but all of the manipulation that it gone through had left it somewhat.....floppy.  No worries, I thought. I'll pop a balloon into it and give it a quick felt to firm it up a bit.

Smart eh?

Not so much. It seems that there were a few places where I had punched the holes a little too closely and with the further manipulation the holes actually ended up acting like perforations in paper.

They tore a bit.

And created holes.

@#&^%$% holes!

As you can see in the "finished?" picture, there was still snow on the ground. It was actually just a couple of days into April when this happened and I have to say that with everything else that has been happening in my life, it acted as a bit of a gumption trap. It took me a couple of weeks to decide how to proceed.

First was to decide to start on April without having satisfactorily finished March.
Second was to decided on April.
Third was to accept that I will be redoing all this work and using my hard earned knowledge of what not to do, hopefully end up with a successful piece.

But give me a couple of months to get up the gumption to punch all those holes again!

February

February.

The shortest month in terms of days and yet it is the month that somehow seems the longest to many people.

The excitement of Christmas and New Year are long past and although the days are getting longer, there is still more dark night than sunlight, and there is that cold to deal with.

There seem to be many fire celebrations that have been historically celebrated in the month of February.
St Bridget's day, Candlemas, Imbloc, and Groundhog Day. All seem to have something to do with the return of the sun. Which is a big ball of fire.

So I decided that February would be about fire.

Prototype of fire.

 The prototype was not exactly what I would call successful. It was rather blob like and not as defined as I thought that "fire" should be. But I learned from my mistake. As often happens, I learned what not to do.

I didn't like the black on the bottom so I removed it. I stitched the vessel that was soft felted in a shibori technique and then felted some more.

Stitched vessel

 I then undid the stitches and using a small stick pushed the sides out to resemble the traditional flame.

Here is a detail of the texture created by felting while stitched. I see a whole world of possibilities opening up!

New Journey

I have decided to make 12 felt vessels in the year 2012. One each month. They shall be named after the months of the year and I will complete each vessel within that month (give or take a few days).  They will all start out with the same template and each will be inspired by something about that month. It might be something that happened to me or something about that month that stands out.

Sounds easy enough. And so far it has been. Sort of.

January was simple. One day, I looked out the kitchen window at our new view of the back yard and was intrigued by the juxtaposition of the white snow, the blue sky, and the starkness of the bush that currently resides in the yard.

January, as I mentioned, was simple.  No new techniques. No need for any extraordinary measures. I made my template and set to work. First try and I had almost exactly what I envisioned. The bush was a little lighter than I had wanted, but after seeing the snow blow around a few days later, I felt that it captured January perfectly.

By the way..... I know it's March. I know that I am starting this documentation a wee bit tardy. The photo above was even taken in March, though the vessel itself was created in January, along with the idea to do a felt journal. But better late than never!