Another Needle Felted Angel

I have made another angel body from needle felting over an armature, this time made from my mammoth new pipe cleaners.

These pipe cleaners are enormous – very long and extra thick and fluffy! Almost large enough to sweep the chimney with. The colours are somewhat lurid but as they will mostly be needle felted or wrapped, I’m not too bothered about that.

Here is the armature for the angel that I made – this one is quite a bit larger than the previous one.

This armature was made from two giant pipe cleaners, one for the head and arms, and the other for the body and legs. I looped the ends of the legs a couple of times to form the feet, and the arms are double thickness with a loop at the ends to form the hands.

I began the needle felting by loosely felting a ball to form the inner part of the head.

Here it is, stuffed into the head loop of the armature.

It was then a simple matter to begin wrapping the whole head with wool roving, needle felting as I went.

Here is the head, almost complete.

As it was quite a bit larger than the first one, I decided to attempt to sculpt a face on this head. I began by adding more roving to the front of the face to build it up.

This is the head in profile so far.

I sculpted the face by building up the nose, forehead and chin, and pushing in the eye sockets and mouth, and the area under the nose, with more aggressive needle felting. Not too bad for a first attempt!

Here is the finished head in profile, showing the ear – I made the ears from two small fragments of wool roving, shaping them as I needle felted them to the sides of the head. The face is a little flat – a bit like an Easter Island statue!

The next step was to needle felt the body. I made it a little bit too long so the proportions aren’t quite right, but once the angel is clothed, this won’t matter. I built up the chest and stomach/bottom areas with extra wool roving.

The final step was to cover the limbs with needle felting. I covered the hands and feet well with roving before beginning to wrap the arms and legs.

Not too bad, I think! With his rather long body and short, slightly bandy legs, he looks a bit like a drunken sailor. At least there was no angel abuse this time, unless you count being stabbed all over repeatedly with a barbed needle!

I’ve been pooped all week. At least the worst of the side effects of the chemo have worn off now, but my energy levels remain extremely low and I’ve done little else but flop about on the recliner since my last treatment. The next one is a week today and I really need to start feeling better so I can actually achieve something before the next one is upon me and I’m back to square one again!

WOYWW 316–Brainless Knitting and Angel Abuse

Not a lot going on chez-Shosh this week because my second round of chemo has completely flattened me – I started to feel poorly while the stuff was still going in, and although a lot of the side effects are now better than they were, I am still feeling profoundly exhausted and have hardly stirred off the recliner for the past week and a half. I was warned by my oncologist that round 2 would be worse, but I am hoping that my body will have acclimatised to the chemo by round 3 and that that treatment won’t affect me so badly.

While undergoing the second treatment, I started knitting a scarf, but unravelled it because my circular needle was too long, and to fill it, the scarf would have been far too wide, with too many stitches, and using too much yarn, so I ordered a nice little short one off Ebay and restarted the project. This is what I call brainless knitting – it can be done without a pattern and with very little concentration. I had a rummage in my wools scrap boxes and selected some nice bright-ish colours and have been working in random stripes, each separated by two rows of black, which give some coherence to the design. This is how much I’ve done so far:

Depending on how many of these scarves I can make in the next five or six months, they will also be added to my box of goodies to hand out to my fellow chemo-ites. I am planning on making some nice brownish ones for the men, and each one will have different types of fringing and tassels on the ends. Working in the round means there’s no making up to do except sewing across the open ends.

After my gifts of small lavender sachets in boxes, I have been thinking a lot about making a collection of mixed media angel art dolls to give away next time. I certainly wasn’t planning on putting pressure on myself to complete them in 3 weeks and as it happened, I have barely started because of feeling so poorly.

While resting on the recliner, I’ve been spending a lot of time trawling Pinterest and making a nice collection of art doll pictures. I decided to use the few rather short pipe cleaners I had, and made an armature (sorry, I didn’t photograph this) and used it as a base for needle felting in white, producing what looks like a little white stick figure, about 5 1/2 inches tall, who although devoid of all features, seems to have a character all his own! He was all a bit fluffy looking when I’d finished, so I wet-felted him as well, and the final step was to throw him violently into the sink to accelerate the felting process, which reduced the poor little figure into a screwed up heap that looked as if he had been mugged!

Angel Abuse.

Here he is, hanging on for dear life, onto my bathroom heated towel rail, being dried. I defined his neck by wrapping a narrow elastic band tightly around it. More Angel Abuse. Not only mugged, but strangled as well.

He lends himself to being bent into many different positions. He doesn’t look too much the worse for his traumatic experiences.

He has no face, no hair, no clothes, and no wings. Yet. Hopefully these deficiencies will soon be remedied and he will take on his full persona as an angel.

I have got on order a nice big pack of thicker, longer pipe cleaners which should enable me to make larger figures. The needle felting was pretty time-consuming, and the friction of the wet-felting has drawn the felt back a bit from his extremities. Not a huge success but practice makes perfect! I’ve also got a few more bits and pieces on order, and I’ve been doing a lot of research into different polymer clays and how to use them – not something with which I have had any experience to speak of, and I hope to make a nice collection of eclectic angels, most of whom should hopefully not end up suffering the indignity of Angel Abuse.