Say Hello to My Little Friend

I would like to introduce you all to my new friend, ummmmmm, OK he is a bit challenged in the looks like a human department but he is mellow and quiet and hardly eats anything.

I call him Mr. Green and there is only a distant relation to someone I know of the same name.  Mr. Green is my very first attempt at needle felting.  Yea, I have never been one of those people who starts out with the simple items like pumpkins and flowers, I go right for the good stuff.

Felting is where you take wool fibres and stab them with incredibly sharp barbed needles that tangle the fibres and allow them to hold a shape.  The texture of the wool becomes "felt like" and Mr Green shows this very well.

As I said, this was my first attempt at felting and, well, it is a bit like hunting tigers.  You think you have it all under control.  You are armed and dangerous but your skill is what evens out the odds of injury or death. 

Yea!  That is why I don't hunt tigers.

I had a few, unbelievably painful mishaps with those needles, and let me tell you that you can feel each and every barb as it enters your hand.  But I learned a few pretty cool things while I tried not to bleed on Mr Green.  I thought that I did pretty good with the layering of features on the little guy.  Cheeks, chin, bottom lip, all added after the head was put together.  Felting a head is a kind of masochistic sculpturing, it is essentially the same process of building up the features.

My favorite part of Mr Green are his teeth.  They are just so cool!  His eyes are needing a lot of work to get them more, well, eye looking, and his hair is completely terrible!  I am actually very happy with my first attempt at felting and think that I am going to try to do a few more things so that I can get better at the whole look of my Mr Green.

Note to the real Mr Green:  You were not the inspiration for this soft sculptured head but the resemblance is there and I apologize for that......Kinda.

Please always remember and don't ever forget:

"It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture."

Tom Stoppard