Latest Projects-Photo Heavy!

It has been nearly 10 months since the last time I posted here!  Sorry about the lapse, folks.  Life has been busy.  Rather than play catch-up, I'm simply going to start from the now.

Here are a few projects I've been working on lately...

I recently started making all of my own lip balm and lotions.  My skin loves it and my complexion is finally improving.  Plus I LOVE the process of concocting new formulas!

I also made 21 little gift/candy boxes for my church's craft sale last week.  

Paper crafting is one of my first loves!

Then I decided to needle felt a small rabbit.

But it started to look like a dog's head.

So then I made a dog...

Because I wasn't using a wire armature with this sculpture, I decided to wet felt it before I added finishing touches to make sure it was strong and solid.

The soft toy I pulled out of the dryer looked more like a kitten than a dog.

So I began crafting a kitten.  This was truly an exercise in letting the wool become what it wanted to be.

After much work, I finally had the child's soft toy I was hoping for:

a cute, playful kitten.

In family news I have to relate a special event from November: my siblings and I joined forces with some childhood friends to throw our  fathers (who have been best friends since birth) a joint 70th birthday party.

It was truly a joyful day of visiting and celebration!

My dad, Don Wille (right), and his good friend, Ervin B.

My parents.

My sister, brother, and me.

And my own little family is managing to survive this bitter winter...

The boys are all doing well at their respective schools.  

I miss my college boys and I love it when they come home and we can all be together.  

 

To curb my empty nest symptoms, I've been spending extra time with my precious Lleulu.  What a gem she is!  Thank goodness for her unconditional love.  :)

Thinking SPRING!

Doll For Miss 'E'

I felt inspired to make a felted doll for my young friend, Miss E.

 

First I made the wire armature.

The citrus is a California Mandarin... (tiny orange)

 

Then I wrapped Shetland wool around the wire and needle felted it in place.

Next I added hair and I sewed a white cotton dress to serve as her base layer...as in nightgown, shift, or plain white dress.

The miniature kitten, which is suppose to approximately resemble Miss E's pet kitten, Bootsie, was actually the last thing to be made.  But it insisted on posing with it's owner.  :)

 

Here is a close up of the kitten.  It is 1.5 x 1 inch.  Each pupil for each eye only took two individual black wool fibers.  TINY!





 

Miss E's doll also needed some pretty clothes and a few animals to roam around her yard.  So I started making felted dresses and capes.  They are adorned with tiny ribbons, needle felting, string, and tiny brads and flowers. 

Pink fringe dress with flower belt. 

Felted blue/green dress with yellow ribbon.

 

Lavender dress with purple felting and ribbon.

Miniature felted rabbit.  (didn't photograph well)

 

Pink cape with flower belt.

 

Brown linen & felted (fur trimmed) cape.

 

Simple purple cape with black brad button.

Mystery poultry.  Is it a chicken?  Is it a duck?  All I know is that it is a bird of some kind and it belongs to Miss E's doll.  :)

Purple dress with felted dots and rick-rack belt.

Kitten miniature.

 

There were a few more clothes in other colors based on these simple patterns.  And I'm including lots of ribbons and brads for Miss E to mix and match with her doll clothes.

I hope she has fun!

 



So, So Busy

I can't even begin to relay all that has transpired since last fall.  Suffice to say, I have been BUSY.  The kind of busy where I'm working on big projects....like planning a grad party for my sons, helping them with their college entrance applications & financial aid, scanning and uploading old family photos to a family-specific blog, a large mailing project for our church, soccer tournament weekends for our youngest son, looking for a good job....and on and on.

And what about the animals of Boston Lake Farm? 

They are all doing just fine.  But I admit I haven't had much time to photograph them.  I hope to set a shearing date for early May.  But we just got 6 new inches of white stuff in the last 48 hours...on top of the mountains of snow we already have... spring seems very, VERY far away.  Lleulu gets spayed this Friday.  Hopefully that goes well for her.  I will certainly be relieved to avoid unwanted litters of pups.

Even though our main floor is currently being painted...and therefor is in great disarray...I'm still trying to do a little needle felting when I can.  I don't have the space, time, or power of concentration to work on my bird orders (for that I apologize!) but I am plucking away at a tiny doll for a little friend.  I hope it turns out well.

 



Needle Felted Critters

A very tiny sheep made with natural wool locks.

I discovered I had to use the tiny locks from around the face area of the fleece to get ones short enough to work on such a small figure.

 

A little Worry Pig for squeezing when one is tense:

 



A second little Worry Pig.  Clancy taught me how to use the Macro funtion on the camera.  So now my photos of tiny things won't be so blurry!

I personally love how the tail turned out.  :)







More Felting

In addition to making more Dryer Stones, I attempted to make a cat toy...

This mouse was intended for my Aunt Lori's cat, Buck.

But Lori liked it too much to give it to the cat.  lol

So I had to make another toy that was less tempting to humans...

Having fun!  :)



Felting Away...

Here are the Felted Dryer Stones I made out of my Shetland britch wool. 

A few accent colors from yarn and lambs wool were used to spruce them up a bit.

 

I also needle felted inside a large cookie cutter to create this flat rabbit.

I had the idea to create a story and a book for him...but I changed my mind.

 

The project I want to do requires the bunny to be flat, but double-sided.

So I added wool to the back and made an additional two-sided bunny.

I'm going to keep my project a secret for a while longer...



Autumn Fiber

I have been a busy bee with fiber lately.  It all started when a local artist that sells her fiberwork at

Bemidji's Natural Choice Farmer's Market

called me to buy natural colored fiber.  She wanted washed batts.  I had plenty of fiber, but little of it was washed up.  And what was scoured was too precious to sell (read: superfine lambs wool in gorgeous grays). Luckily, Becky had lots of fiber on hand and I was able to refer the lady to her.  This artist even said, "OH, I follow Becky's blog already!"  So I hope it all worked out.

 

This little experience prompted me to DO SOMETHING with all the raw fleece I had still sitting around.  I gathered everything I had from this spring's shearing, and years past, together.  I had to finish skirting four spring fleeces.  Then I made the radical decision to let someone else do the scouring.  After a couple phone chats with Kelly Knispel at

Dakota Carding & Wool

I confidently shipped off nine bags of wool to her expert care.  Five bags will be washed.  Four bags will be washed and carded.  Kelly was great about processing each fleece separately so I could keep my small amounts of colors separate.

 

That left just a few small piles of neck and britch wool that didn't fit into my grand scheme of mill processing.  But these were small enough batches for me to wash in the kitchen sink.  So I got started on that project and I have been flicking and carding ever since.

 

Clockwise from top left:

Carmel neck wool, Charcoal neck wool (from Lana's black gully neck colors), Black britch, Moorit Iset Britch, Moorit Britch, Dark Brown neck wool.

 

Yesterday, a friend on Facebook asked if I had wool she could use to make Dryer Balls.  I figured the britch wool would be great for that.  But I had to make some Dryer Balls first so I knew how much wool it required.

So now I have a couple of kits put together for this craft project.

 

It feels GREAT to finally be DEALING with this wool!



Needle Felted Bible Characters

My facebook friends have already seen these pictures.  But I really wanted to post them to my farm blog as well.

I made these Bible characters to use for the three days I taught the pre-school kids at our church's Vacation Bible School.  They are made from doll pins (clothes pins), Shetland wool for the hair and certain bits of clothing.  I also used fabric scraps and an old white t-shirt.  :)

The Story of Adam & Eve

Moses & The People of Israel Wandering in the Desert

The Crucifixion & Resurrection of Jesus

(Ministry, Crucifixion, Tomb, Resurrection)





I don't know when I'll find the time...but I definitely want to make more of these.  It is fun to design different charachters.... and I like having props when I teach Sunday School and VBS.



Spring For Sure

The wild plums are thick with blossoms this year.  Their scent is heavenly!  Our weather has been fairly warm and dry so we will hopefully get a plum crop again this summer.  Love plum jam!  

We had the sheep sheared later than usual this year, on April 22.  In the absence of lambing, there was no real hurry to clean the girls up so I could view their pregnancies.  Fleeces came off much better than last year - yay! - and a wonderful group of people came out to the farm that day to be a part of the event.  I couldn't have asked for a more fun and helpful bunch of folks.  A huge thank you to Mary, Kristen, Susan & Dennis, and Kayla for EVERYTHING.  And of course I wish to thank Byron Johnson, who does such an excellent job of shearing.  And I have special gratitude for my husband, Clancy, who keeps me sane and does all the hardest prep-work and hoof trimming.

Luckily for the ewes, we have had beautiful weather since shearing.  I haven't feared for them being cold even once.  They have also been solely on enclosed grass for about a week now.  I still have to move the electro-net every day because the grass isn't growing super-fast yet...but it is getting there.  In fact, the season seems about a month ahead of schedule.

Those that follow Boston Lake Farm on Facebook have seen this picture before...of the spindles I am making out of wooden toy wheels and dowels.  The idea is simple: stick the dowel through the wheel and ta-Da.  But it actually takes me a little while to shape the dowel ends to be soft and round and to sand down the end that is put through the wheel.  The dowel is just a little too big, which ensures a tight fit.  I've been enjoying using these supported spindles a lot.  They spin 'forever' and are perfect for the finer yarns I like to spin.  Plus I just have fun working with the wood.  These spindles are fairly small (1.75-2" whorls)  But I have a short attention span so they are perfect for me.

Happy May Day!

Needle Felted Giant Panda

  After adding wire legs to my chickadee sculpture I knew that I wanted to experiment with a wire armature for my next sculpture.  So when a friend requested a panda for her daughter's upcoming birthday, it seemed like a perfect fit for my next felting project.  Giant pandas are wonderfully round, too, which was a blessing...considering how many layers it took to cover the wire.

Both sides of the panda.

I really thought I knew what a panda looked like.  Everyone knows what a panda looks like, right?

Thank goodness for image search engines.  It didn't take me long to realize that if I sculpted from memory my panda was going to look like a "cutesy" black and white teddy bear.  That wouldn't have been bad...but my intention, again, was for realism.

I started by creating a wire armature as similar to the bone structure of a real panda skeleton as I could manage.  I am NOT handy with wire bending yet.  After two hours and many failed attempts, the above asymmetrical form was deemed "good enough" to move forward with.


Then I wrapped wool around the wire and needled it together so I had something I could anchor more and more wool to.

This last picture shows my basic panda sculpture after all the fine white wool was added over the course-wool, cream-colored form...just as I began adding the 'black' portions.  You can see the one hind foot is already felted black.  And though the photo doesn't show it well, the visible front leg is still the course-wool form showing through.  I didn't bother adding soft white wool to the areas that would eventually be filled in with black wool.  Can you see the difference in texture between the course wool on the front leg and the finer wool on the back leg?