A good start to January 2025

Good riddance to 2024!  In July I suffered a fractured bone in my right hand, in December I had septic bursitis in my left elbow.  So onto 2025 in which I hope everyone enjoys good health, inspiration and creativity!

As for me, I'm back to the graveyard, my favorite place.  This project started with an unfortunate purchase, a piece of think prefelt that was so lumpy I didn't know what to do with it.  I thought to wet felt over top...

...and chose greens and blues.  Sadly, the fibre I added did not fuse to the prefelt but still the end result was a lovely, dreamy landscape of sorts.

Which way was up?

A marshy pond perhaps?

Or a moonlit clearing?  

I went with the clearing after my sister said she could see a cemetery there!  Thanks Doris!  

Using my big garden kneeling pad, I laid out the piece and started adding landscape features:  earth and grasses and shrubs...  and a lovely huge full moon coming out from behind misty clouds.

When I had a background I liked, I cut out gravestones from paper and laid them out to see how to arrange them and to see what sizes would make the image 3D.

I then cut them out of very thin black prefelt and tacked them down.  A mix of a blue-y grey color was felted into the black and each stone got highlighting in light grey where the moonlight hits.  Shadows were also fun, in a greeny-grey color.  

And this was the end result!

Here are some close-up images to see the details of the gravestones.

In muted light, it looks even better!

For those who are wondering, I sewed three loops of felt onto the back and inserted a dowel through the loops.  I then used a piece of pipe cleaner to use as a hook:  since the image may not be balanced weight-wise, it was important to be able to move the hook to where it's needed to get the cemetery to hang straight!