Still a Work In Progress?

I know that I haven’t shared any new work for a few weeks. Work time at the table has been split between pieces for my summer feature show, and smaller items for our gallery’s Mother’s Day/spring Pop-up. I decided not to try to share images of all the mini sculptures. Time spent editing photos takes away from creating. My latest sculpture made me “try again” each time I looked at photos of it. Something just wasn’t quite the way I wanted it.

Meet Snow Joy, I might aptly refer to him as my recent nemesis. I continued my exploration of transformed animal print patterns with the idea of a snow leopard. Specifically, a snow leopard cub with some markings that appeared suspiciously like snowflakes. The result is Snow Joy.

What wasn’t right about Snow Joy? He just needed more, more expression, more movement, and more fuzziness. In needle felting, a fuzzy surface is usually a no-no. The goal is to achieve a nice smooth surface to one’s work. The exception to this is when you want an intentionally fuzzy or long haired appearance. I encountered a challenge with this. The usual method used is more like rooting one end of the fibers, but this doesn’t lend itself to the surface patterning I was trying to achieve. As you might imagine I was unimpressed with the images I took of the completed piece.

Try Again

So, I reworked his coat some with a reverse felting needle. This unique needle does nothing as you stab into the wool, and pulls fibers up from below as you back out. I took more photos. Nope, still not right, try again. This time, I contorted the sculpture into a more exaggerated posture. I reattached it to the “rock” I felted as a partial base, and more reverse felting.

He’s closer now to what I had in my mind and sketchbook. Sometimes I need to take another step back and look again with fresh eyes. You may see some updated images as we get closer to show time. Stay tuned.

Snow Joy is needle felted wool over an armature of wire and quilt batting. His “rock” started out life as a wool dryer ball that I beat, squished, and felted into a different shape. I then felted grey and white wool in a marbling like pattern to the rock surface. Snow Joy’s coat has random crystals sewn to it, and his eyes are glass beads. I used fishing line for his whiskers, and dark transparent thread for his eye brow hairs.

Snow Joy may appear as you see in my FA show in July, or I may take another stab (pun intended) at him in the coming weeks.