Felting with cats

Pip enjoying the blown vinyl feel of my resist!

I always shut myself in the kitchen to felt, to prevent the many paws from assisting me. But the weather is so warm and as the cats all seemed quite content and sleepy outside I thought I'd give it a go. Pip was the first to get involved, as the plastic foam packaging was rather nice to roll around on and dig your claws into. 

Mojo was content to stay outside in the new cat basket underneath the sweet scented surfinas, along with Indiana who was lounging on the table.

Saturday afternoon produced my sisters birthday bag, my first attempt at resist felting and I was pleased with the outcome...I just hope she is!

It just needs some embroidery on the top flap, and a strap to finish it off. At least sunny days make for items drying very quickly.

The baskets are coming along lovely and filling door outdoor space with lots of colours and scents and wildlife too, butterflies and bees in the day and moths at night. The purple petunias are beginning to trail, so maybe they will do what it said on the label!

My fuchsias are about to burst from their lantern shapes and I can't wait to see those frilly dresses as I can't remember what colours I picked! 

The calenedula were just soooo orange in the sunshine! My two favourite colours, orange and green.

My cadbury purple petunias are just so velvety, and the colour makes me think of chocolate!

Anyway time to get on with the felting, but not before actually scribbling down some ideas in my notebook which has seen quite a bit of use. The plan was to make a new post bag in green. So I made a template to make sure the edges were straight to start with. It was too big for the kitchen worktop so I had to use the dining room table. The plan is to just join those edges so it makes a block bottomed bag, but this time I measured more accurately so it should look neater.

David came in with a nice cup of tea and said he felt the urge to roll about on all that fluffiness, and I know what he means! Foster kitten Zoe was evicted as it was just too much for her to bear! She is finally re-rehabilitated after her dreadful start in life and it has taken 6 months of much patience to get her to like humans and help from Chloe another foster who was taken to the vet for a PTS because they didn't want her anymore. Now I just have to find her a loving home.

So the base was the easy bit, now for the design.

With the worlds 'less is more' ringing in my head, I utterly deviated from the plan drawn earlier and did my own thing! It was supposed to be all shades of green and very muted, but after looking at that calendula the orange, yellow and browns came out!

And although it looked OK to me for a while, I felt it was a bit busy (yes me thinking it was too much!). Bearing in mind I hadn't used any angelina or curly locks at all and felt quite proud I had resisted that temptation, but had gone a bit mad with introducing the hot colours. So I took off the leaves in the corners and re-arranged the smaller stars, still not sure whether to just strip it back to green.

Final decision was to leave it like this and get on with rolling. So back out to the kitchen as this table just breaks your back as it's too low.

At least the view when rolling is pretty this time of year! David wanted cappuccino coffee so he got roped into some of the rolling whilst I made us some.  I stupidly forgot to photograph the end result, so that will have to come later. But it was a lovely sunny weekend at home, making things, drinking coffee and sitting in the sun and tickling cats!