Ginger Wilson

Monday, June 9, 2014

Wet felting waterlilies

I've been making some ocean/water themed art pieces lately, and decided to do a felted piece with waterlilies. I think it turned out great. I still need to dry felt some details and do some machine stitching, but I really like how it has a Monet-like feel to it.

Here I have laid out all of the roving and put a piece of tulle over it. I was worried about the purple and green roving felting correctly. I had bought it as a hand-dyed blend, and noticed it was actually wool superwash and I was concerned it would not felt. (Superwash is a wool than can be machine washed with less concern about felting or shrinkage). There is white wool roving as a base, and I did add some thin wool over the top as well. It felted just fine.

Here it is after felting but while it was still wet. You can see the white silk pieces aren't very visible here.

Here it is after it dried. I think its lovely. I will add a bit of dry felting and I want to machine stitch to make the lily pads pop.

Close-up. The white dots are the flowers.

Wet felting is a lot of work and takes some patience but the results make me smile.

Friday, June 6, 2014

Nebraska house, first step in the fix-up

We closed on Tuesday for our new (to us) house in Nebraska. Here are some "before" pictures from when we first saw the house. I am really good at looking past ugly paint and decorating. The first step is painting these rooms.

The most torturous part is getting rid of these stenciled (spackled and three dimensional) decorations that were on both sides of the arch.

The power didn't get turned on until pretty late in the day, so we starting chipping it off with a putty knife and a hammer.

Once we got power, we moved on to the sander.

Here is the "before" picture.

"During".

"After". This is just primed with Kilz primer, we still need to pick a paint color, and paint it all. Next week we are getting the floors refinished, so we won't be able to finish painting until we move in.

Another before photo, after sanding the stenciled decorations.

During

After

We drove back to Colorado after three days of work, so I took a picture of the Colorado sunset on the way home. There won't be many more mountain views for us, it's only two weeks until we move.