Appreciating the world of art, design, and handmade craft -plus all things creative, lovely and inspiring! Sharing my travels, my experiences, my fancies ... My Paisley World!
I'd love to show you the awesome wool art of Good Natured. Dani creates gorgeous works of art using a technique called needle felting, the process of felting wool fibers together using barbed needles. Many of her subjects are animals she encountered while working for 10 years as an educator at a zoo. Now she combines her passion for animals with her artistic talent. Enjoy these examples of how Dani successfully captures these likenesses by "painting" with wool!
I just had to show you a close-up of this peach.
I am amazed at the realistic colors and shading that she captured!
A very cool things that Dani does is take custom orders for pet portraits!
Birds of Beebe Woods is what first attracted me to Salley Mavor.
And I'm talking about a magnetic attraction.
Not just because I'm a lover of birds,
but because of her meticulous focus on fine details!
Millions of tiny little embroidery stitches - all done by hand!
Here's a close-up of her cardinal to show you what I mean:
Sewing since childhood, Salley creates collages using what she calls "fabric relief,"
a type of bas relief. (I had to look that one up.)
"a sculpture technique in which figures and/or other design elements are
just barely more prominent than the (overall flat) background.
It is created either by carving away material or
adding material to the top of an otherwise smooth surface,
a technique as old as humankind's artistic explorations."
In this miniature scene, she incorporates driftwood.
Just look at those beautifully stitched branches!
While the original fiber art creations are displayed in shadowbox frames for public exhibition,
photographs of them are used to make prints, posters and notecards.
They've also been featured as illustrations for 12 books.
This one, Pocketful of Posies: A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes,
is a winner of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for picture book and the
Golden Kite Award for picture book illustration
from the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators.
A love for wee little things drew Salley to make wee little dolls,
fully outfitted with adorable clothing and accessories made from wool felt.
She calls them wee folk and therefore, Wee Folk Studios.
Her latest book is titled Felt Wee Folk: New Adventures,
a how-to book to follow up the great success of Felt Wee Folk: Enchanting Projects.
Here's the YouTube video of its book trailer:
This fabric relief project, Self Portrait: A Personal History of Fashion,
documents a timeline of Salley through the years.
Oh, the details! How about that poncho?
Face Time is a tree of wreathed cameos of people who represent
the cultures of the world and the changes in them through the years.
Adorable, right?
Since childhood, Maggie Rudy has loved mice.
In fact, her father gave her the nickname "Maggie Mouse!"
It's no wonder, then, that mice are the subject of her cuter-than-cute artistry.
Maggie's mice are not for sale; she creates them to illustrate her books.
The House that Mouse Built is available through Amazon.
Maggie uses felt and pipe cleaners to make her adorable mice.
Don't they just tickle your fancy?
As she puts together the detailed props and background for each scene,
it's fun to see the imaginative ways in which the mice
make their tiny furniture and such from "people things!"
Bottle caps, seed pods, match boxes, or spools of thread
take on new uses in this miniature world.
Card Game
Mouse Maker (a self-portrait?)
Pin the Tail on the Kitty
Pink Girls
Pizza!
Travellers
Introverts
Jump Rope
Good Book
(This scene seems a quite familiar...Love ya, Honey!)
