Challenging Assumptions.

With ME, there's an overriding assumption that, whatever it is, you're not going to have the energy to do it.  That's not always true, though, in fairness, a goodly percentage of the time, it is.  I've talked about how my practice revolves around the expressive and the experimental....but it also embraces adaptation, these days, from bitter necessity.  I've been hankering for wet felting recently, and I just know, without trying, that fifteen minutes of that would be the only thing I got done that day, a very high price to pay for admittedly a very expressive form of textile art.  And then I found this.

It was an ACEO (does anybody make those any more?), though I did think about making it into a brooch (does anybody wear those any more, other than me?).  Though I suspect that the base felt might have been wet felted, the top layer was definitely added using an embellisher, and finished off with hand stitch.  And that made me think.

I recently bought a metre of prefelt, something I haven't used before (a blog post about prefelt here, if you haven't come across it before).  I do have a fair amount of wool tops...who can resist those fabulous colours. especially when they're dyed in multiple colours... and had almost got to the point of giving them all away.  But I do have an embellisher, and I can work with it.  In many ways, it would be better than using a sewing machine, because piecing usually requires getting up and down to press the work, or cut more pieces, or whatever... and that's very tiring.  Yes, I could set the work up in such a way as to be able to swivel to use the ironing board...but it would block both the doors if I did.   Now, all I have to do is change the needles in the embellisher, and Get Started.

Sounds like a decent compromise to me.  Might even get some book pages out of it...