Inspired by the flowers in my herbaceous border and being extremely short of time this week I suddenly realised on Monday that I had the perfect coloured batts in my studio coupled with just enough time to felt a simple cylindrical vessel. 

Detail from aquilegia felt vessel

Last summer at Felt in Focus there were some wonderful suppliers from which participants could purchase fibres, yarn and fabrics from.  One of the smaller Danish producers Henrik Hjelholts had the most amazing coloured leicester/merino and gotland/merino batts, I couldn’t help but drool over them each day and just before he closed up shop at the end of the symposium I succumbed to the lure of the fibre!  This wool was a little bit more expensive that I had been used to buying hence my unusual hesitation but as I have discovered it is absolutely gorgeous to felt with I now consider it totally worth the extra cost.  Since then I have been gazing periodically at the wine and raspberry gotland/merino batts that I bought (most of the green leicester/merino has already been put to good use in a bag!) and once I decided to felt the vessel on Monday everything just seemed to come together in my mind pretty quickly.  

Back of aquilegia felt vessel

For the inner layer of green I used the leicester/merino mix and the outer layer of wine is the gotland/merino cross, combining these two blends of fibre has created a very stable felt vessel.  I wanted to expose an ‘eye’ of colour at the front of the piece so after laying out the green I positioned an oval shaped plastic resist near the top of the vessel.  This I covered with two layers of gotland/merino, colour ‘Karry’, before adding another slightly smaller oval resist and completing the vessel in the wine.  When I had everything almost completly felted and fulled I exposed the two ‘eyes’, originally I had thought about beading one of the layers but on reflection I like the felt just as it is!