From the top down

Felting the contour edges in bush-green tones.

I've picked up a project again that I started last year and then put aside for other more pressing things.  In the interim I've lost my passionate commitment to the original concept, but the piece is big enough for me to take it quite a bit further before I have to decide exactly what it 'means'.

Felting  needles in action

The 50 metre contour lines are those of Mt Te Aroha, as are the mottled tone greens of the New Zealand bush.  The way I make a mountain (or any landscape) from blankets is to work from the top down, finishing each contour before adding the next one below.

Over-stitching with mixed strands of DMC cotton.

There's a lot of colour mixing to do before I felt and stitch the blankets together.  I blend five shades of dyed wool into combinations of two or three to get the subtlety of many different plants sitting in light and shadow.  The thread is even more work- I separate six stranded DMC cotton into pairs and single strands and them mix six colours into various combinations to stitch as three strands.  After all that finicky preparation I eventually apply the wool and threads more or less at random.

Looking out across the mountain top