Thursday, October 18, 2007

I made representational art!

At Knitspiration knitting guild on Monday we explored needle felting. I started out making a lovely abstract object , stabbing away at a blob of fiber to mat it together. Every once in a while, I turned it over & pulled off stray bloblets that weren't working for me, and then suddenly I turned it over and found out it had become this lovely cat shape. I added the eye & collar as my last touches, committing to the idea of this being representational art.

Needle felting has never really called to me, but when I sat down to do it, I had a blast with this technique. I loved the slightly intentional / slightly random nature of the work I did (not saying this is the way needle felting has to be, but it is the aspect which drew me in.)

We had invited Gunilla as our instructor and she brought all the towels, foam pads, felting needles and fiber for us to work with. I managed to snap a felting needle in the first 15 stabs... but then worked for a whole hour with no further problems.

I thought the whole guild did wonderful things with this fun technique. We had 9 creative, beautiful objects at the end of our session -- most had stuck with the abstract, for which I applaud them. I wish I'd had my camera along to take pictures of the beautiful objects everyone made - but it's been stolen. Waah! (Emy - I'm keen to hear how you like your new SD850!)

And for a progress update on the 10 UFO's -- here's a photo of the mittens I made from the watermelon yarn (using the pattern designed by Freshisle Fibers specifically for the yarn.) These are ready to mail to my auntie in Wisconsin, to keep her warm this winter. I've also got an odd-duck scarf to send her. Too bad her new mittens and scarf won't match at all. Still. The UFO pile must go, whether it matches or not. I'm not sure I'm going to meet my October 31 deadline to have them all done. Does 70% pass?

2 Comments:

Blogger Emy said...

Ah, that was you? It was an anonymous comment, so I wasn't sure.

I do love the camera. My previous one was another Canon, the S500, and I continued the Canon love with the SD850. When we made the decision, it came down to that one or the SD1000, and I think I chose the 850 because it had a viewfinder on it. One of the reasons I kind of needed a new one was that the digital display on the S500 was kind of broken (sometimes it was fine, sometimes it just showed a really wacky version of what it was looking at), which had gotten to be frustrating. Because of this experience, it was important to me to have a viewfinder, so that I could take pictures if something happened to the digital display, so that was the deciding factor there.

Then, of course, we got home, Ray did some searching, and thought that maybe my problem on the S500 was related to a service notice that Canon had issued, and he convinced me to contact them. I did, and it apparently was related, so Canon repaired my 4 year old camera at no charge, and it's now been designated the "beater" camera, to be used when we go biking or something. Heh.

But yes, I do love the new camera. Nice and compact, does everything I need to, works nicely, two thumbs up. And certainly Canon gets cool points on the customer service front as well.

October 18, 2007 6:47 PM  
Blogger Alison said...

I love that cat. The colours of the felting reflect cat fur so beautifully.

October 19, 2007 7:27 AM  

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