Laminate v Felt Foxglove Pictures

I was recently lucky enough to go to a workshop with the incredibly talented Andrea Hunter. The workshop was in her studio so we spent the day surrounded by her wonderful pieces - it was very inspirational. 

I used a photo of foxgloves above Grasmere as a starting point for my picture.

Here's the picture I made on the day.

I came away feeling very inspired to create some more foxglove pictures and wanted to do one in the style of my lavender picture.

I made some prefelts in foxglove petal shapes.

I wanted to use the laminate technique so used a backing of hand dyed cotton scrim. I laid down a background of oranges and greens on top of this and then added hand dyed prefelt and yarns. Then I cut the petals out of my prefelt and laid them down on top.

I wet the piece and did the usual rubbing and rolling followed by some gentle throwing.

Here is the result.

And a close up.

I like using the laminate technique in my pictures because it means I can make them very thin. However, it does mean that they shrink considerably. Sometimes this can be beneficial since it softens the detail and I particularly like how the prefelts crinkle and the yarns really crunch up.

But since I had some of my prefelt foxglove petals left over I decided to make another picture  - this time with a thin merino backing which I wouldn't shrink down as much and so the detail would be sharper.

My first layer was white (I would have used a natural white but only had World of Wool's 'lightening' so used that instead). For the second layer I did the top in white and the bottom two thirds yellow.

I then laid down a sky, some hills and some brighly coloured grass with merino wool. I added my hand dyed prefelt and yarns again.

I  wet the piece and laid my foxgloves on top - this way when I kept rearranging them I didn't disturb the fibres underneath.

I added more water to the petals, covered with plastic and rubbed to set the design for about 20 minutes. Then rolled until it was quite lightly felted.

The finished piece.

 

And a close up.

And here they all are together.