Felted Journal Covers

I recently acquired a felting machine. I have been fascinated for some time with the whole concept of felting. The machine gives you a few more options. One of those being that you can use it to fuse fabric to your felted piece. The machine is a lot faster, also.

This is a brand new world for me. I am experimenting with fabric, wool, felt, ribbon, lace, and yarn. Whoa! That is a lot to play around with. Once you sit down and spend some time you just want to try everything.

I started with a sheet of felt that you would do craft or hobbies with. Not a particularly heavy weight piece of felt. It was about the size of a piece of copy paper. I then grabbed a bunch of scraps from my sewing table, fiber bag, and some wool roving. Turned on the machine and began to randomly fill the sheet of felt. Each fabric, ribbon, lace has its own texture and look.
After the sheet was pretty much filled up I grabbed an image of a young woman that was printed on muslin and sewed it on with my sewing machine. I went randomly over the felted piece with my sewing machine to secure or highlight various parts of the sheet.

At this point I was sort of at a loss as what to do with the felted piece. I thought of cutting it up into ATC's or postcards. After a quick glance around my studio I decide maybe a book cover or a fabric book. I had a cheapy notebook I had picked up and it was the right size if I cut the sheet in two pieces. So I cut the sheet in two and used gel medium to glue it to the covers of the plain black notebook. Voila! A new journal and made from scraps except for the image and a paper flower. This really has possibilities.

Large Fabric Board Book

This is a large, thirteen by nine, children's board book. I have worked on this over a period of time. I have used scrap fabric from other projects, left over images printed on fabric, found objects, etc. The outside cover and back are a yummy aqua velvet, found at a yard sale for a dollar. For the inside I stuck with cottons, drapery samples, etc. It is put together but not finished. The bones are there.
Do you ever have projects like that? They look okay but there is just something you need to do to make it really outstanding. I think it needs some acrylic paint and maybe some fabric dye. or maybe it is one of those situations that Robert Browning spoke of. "Less is more". So now I am putting it out there - see what you think. When I finish I will post some of the pages. So here is the rough draft.