Sometimes you just get detoured off the main road, possibly to a dead end. These photos illustrate my detour into a folksy, cutesy direction with two of the pieces. I rescued the last piece before I completely lost my bearings! Perhaps I just needed to get that out of my system before moving forward. This really is the value of play, to be able to explore different possibilities and just see where your imagination takes you. Funny how an image will appear seemingly out of nowhere.
Anyone old enough to remember the stories by Thornton W. Burgess such as The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat or Reddy Fox will recognize Old Mother West Wind and Mr. Sun as characters from his children's stories. I have a special fondness for Folk Art and these pieces demonstrate this love.
Both pieces are heavily felted giving them lots of body but making it more difficult to add decorative stitching. I have discovered that it is best to limit the felting to the base layers only and then use the regular sewing machine to apply other wools and fabrics later. The felting process destroys the fabric and a new base layer must be added so the sewing threads have something to catch onto. At this point I am going to put them aside and return to a simpler more abstract vision. I have one of the original three pieces to work with and am planning on creating three more in a similar style.
Perhaps in retrospect I should have resisted my urge to play but I think I needed to give in to a bit of silliness and explore different avenues of expression. As my children will attest to, I am a little crazy about mazes, particularly corn mazes in the fall, and enjoy following a new route even if it leads to a dead end!
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