Selfies!

Day 299: Kitty selfies! As you can probably guess from the title of the book, the portraits were hand-felted from Tip's and Skunk's fur. A friend had sent me the book suggestion as a joke, but I took it seriously and ordered it almost immediately. I'm always interested in learning new crafts, and needle-felting was something I'd never tried. Special felting needles with barbed points are used to mingle wool (or cat hair) onto a base fabric or into its own fibers to form a matted fabric similar to the felt you'd purchase in a crafts store. Here, I used a commercial felt square for the background, shaping the cats with the aid of a plastic stencil. Stray hairs always linger around the edges, and these were trimmed away with embroidery scissors to give more defined outlines. I made Tip (the black kitty) first to get a feel for the process and then created Skunk, a more challenging subject because of her colouration. Each kitty took about fifteen minutes to complete. The same technique can be used with wool (sheep, llama, goat, etc.). To protect the felter's lap from inadvertent pokes, felting is done on a thick piece of foam, but mind your fingertips! Warning issued, rest assured that no cats or mamas were damaged in the making of these "self-portraits."