Yesterday I started planning my next couple needle felting projects from landscape photos I have. I cut the pre-felt to size and started pulling together colors, but I realized I was short a couple of the colors I needed for both of the next two landscapes I wanted to do. So after making a quick purchase online, I set about trying to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of the afternoon.
I have knitting I could work on. Or some of my spinning. But really, I wanted to do needle felting. I tidied up the edges on a couple pieces I’d already finished, but was still dissatisfied. Maybe there was another picture I could start on? Eh… nothing I was really feeling like working on.
And somewhere in my annoyance and frustration that I didn’t have the colors I needed, and had nothing to work on, I realized… I can do whatever I want.
It doesn’t have to be a needle felt from an image. That’s just what I’ve been doing. Loads of people do lots of non-representational stuff. Like, this is an entire span of art. I was artificially boxing myself in. And, I’ll note, in a way I would probably never box anybody else in. Just do it to myself. Double standards and all that.
I decided that I was feeling in the mood for reds, oranges, and browns, thus these became my jumping off point. So I put on some music (KMFDM – industrial) started playing around some and had this by the end of the evening:
The bits of texture are basically little hand spun ply sampling twists, which I made in different lengths and thicknesses with different degrees of twist. I felt like I was close, but not quite there. However, it was getting late and I just couldn’t quite see what it was missing except that it was something.
After sleeping on it and taking another look this morning, I realized that yellow was the missing piece.
I think its… not bad? Reasonably attractive? Expresses something, maybe? I’m trying not to let my perfectionist nature get in the way and to remind myself that sometimes I can just create, be happy with what I’ve done, and consider each thing I do to be good practice. Also, TheEnabler likes it and he’s really bad at lying about this sort of thing.