How some Fuzzy Felt became an Enchanted Pond

Prefelts! Have you heard of them? They are just wool roving that has been partially-felted into fabric-like sheets. Did you just ask “why would someone do that?”. Well, imagine forming a handful of fluff into a well-defined shape, like a leaf or flower, versus cutting it from a piece of fabric. Simplicity would prefer cutting from fabric.

So, if you wish to create a felted landscape or garden or portrait of your cat, you can cut the mountains, trees, flowers, ears, eyes and tails very precisely and felt them onto a background.

There are more than 85 solid, hand-dyed colors, and unlimited hand-painted color possibilities. They come individually or in various color assortments and sizes. Pretty flexible!!

I like to make backgrounds from them that I can then embroider.

The fat-quarters have beautiful, deckled edges on one or two sides, that are my favorite part. In the photo, above, I layered different colors to create a garden backdrop, with the deckles on top. I gently “basted” them together with a needle-felter and added a bit of background fuzz for shadows.

Then I felted them a bit more with soap, hot water and some gentle agitation, added some embroidery to the dried piece….

…

and created a little garden.

Below, are some of the deckled edges of hand-painted sheets.

I was inspired by these hand-painted sheets to do something different. Instead of layering the background,…..

I chose one narrow piece and tried to see a picture in it.

With some trepidation, I just began…..

It wasn’t until I started embroidering that a picture actually emerged.

Those large, pink flowers started looking like (rather demented) waterlilies, to me, which meant this lavender and gold fuzz had become a pond right before my eyes.