peephole stones :: work in progress

when i'm at the beach, i love to look for stones with holes in them. i also love felting stones, tho' i do always have a pang of anguish over covering up my carefully-selected stone. so last night i decided to experiment with felting a stone with peepholes, so i could have the felt and still enjoy the stone.

i ran a couple of experiments - wrapping the stones, cutting holes and then felting. that doesn't work too well. you have to wrap the stone (use lisa's great tutorial), felt it a bit, so the felt is tight around the stone, then cut your holes and continue felting.

i got a bit fancy with this one, using two colors. i felted the orange around the stone first, then added the red, felted a bit and carefully trimmed the red layer away from the orange before they got too stuck together. i loved that the stone had a little hole started and i wanted it to show.

a couple of them came off the stones and i ended up with these little felty vessels instead. i'm going to play with them some more to see what they might become.

i'm also going to add some more embellishment (stitching, beads, painting on the stone) to these, so they're still works in progress. but i just had to share them already now. i feel like they're a breakthrough in making the felted stone notion my own. and they're getting me closer to a picture that's in my head. stay tuned.

i played a bit with my new inks yesterday as well, painting a few feather stones and even a bit of driftwood (the inks bleed on it in unexpected ways). i am madly in love with the paynes grey. the sun has gone again and there's a light sprinkling of snow on the ground, so it's a perfect day to stay inside with a cup of tea and play with felt and stones and ink.

when rivers of ideas begin to flow

here's what happened with my green felted stone - in fact, in this shot, it's not even dry yet.  if you recall, i used lisa's stone felting tutorial. and i fussed about worried about over-thought pondered how to make it my own. with a little viking helleristning (petroglyph), i think i managed it. i'm not done with this idea yet.

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i have spent a couple of very energizing days with a friend with whom i feel very much in synch. so many ideas surfaced and best of all, it feels like there is action and impetus behind the ideas, so some of them may even materialize. i had the strangest feeling after we met last friday (what i thought would be a 2-hour meeting turned into 5 because we were so crazy in flow)...it felt like a dam had been released inside me and all of the pent-up ideas and thoughts i had had in recent months just began to surface and tho' they were coming quickly, it feels like it's at a pace where i can grab and examine them. some of them had been there for awhile, but some were entirely new. it was positively elating. it's odd how you can get all blocked and not even realize it until you're not blocked anymore.

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things i'm pondering:

what it might mean to be a social artist

community gardens.

art walls.

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i think my keyboard may be menopausal - the period is getting pretty unpredictable.

sorry. bad joke. couldn't help myself.

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what's your type?

find out here.

apparently i'm architype van doesburg (a brutally fair typeface).

play the game, if only to hear the narrator's awesome accent.

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the p boards on pinterest: patchwork. peacocks. personal style. photos that make me think.