Bag and the City - a wool painted hand felted bag

Wool painted...

that is how I like to describe my hand felted bags.

However, I often get an impression, that some people understand it the wrong way, like if it involved any brushes or paint. Not at all. On the contrary, wool painting is a process of laying out different colors of wool, silk fibers and any other materials in order to get a picture on a felt work. It has to be wet felted, too.

 

This particular picture you have already seen in one of my first posts on this blog. It is a part of a bigger project, of course.

For a moment, close your eyes and imagine big city lights in the distance...

The idea of using  this image in a pictorial felt work hounted me for quite a while, inspired by some interesting artworks I'd seen before. 

I live in green suburbs now, but I used to enjoy living in a big city. 

When a friend of mine asked me to felt a bag for her sister, who - at least for now - is a city girl, I thought it was time to give the idea a try. 

 The bag was supposed to be in blueish tones - to match jeans, just big enough for a wallet, a phone and some keys and ready for every day arounds.  

To achieve a result I wanted, I had to use different techniques in the process of felting, for example prefelt, nuno-felting and dry felting.

I chose Polish wool in a beautiful - and my favourite - blue color for the base of this project. It was actually nuno-felted on cotton, instead of silk. The whole picture, however, is made of merino wool in shades of blue, grey and white, with just a pinch of green for the leaves on the tree branches and yellow for the city lights. I also used a lot of silk, linen and bamboo fibers and some synthetic fibers as well.

The girl with the dog and the umbrella was dry felted with a dry felting needle using black merino wool, some wool locks in a very unusual shade of pinky - red and some colorfull Sari silk fibers.

The lining inside is made of cotton in natural ivory color, with two pockets, magnetic lock and the strap in a color contrasting with the bag itself, but matching  the tones of the girl's hair and outfit. 

It isn't the first of my pictorial felt projects, but it certainly is my favourite, so far. The idea of felting pictures has really grown on me. It seems to have endless possibilities in experimenting and trying out different combinations of techniques known to me, and looking for new techniques, forms and materials. And I know, that my projects are different that any other pictorial felt works.

I honestly don't know, what is going to happen to this bag, is this friend of mine going to like it? What's even more important in this case, would her sister like it?

I kind of like it myself. Won't be easy to let go of something so beautiful.