One of the local banks - Evergreen Federal introduced a community art project to help save lives through raising money to purchase automated defibrillator devices for the public schools. The project is called Heart 2 Heart. For every heart picked up, decorated and brought back to the bank for display they will donate $1 to the fund (over 5000 hearts are available for pickup). By Valentine's Day the hearts will be available for sale raising even more money, any not sold will be donated to local nursing homes and soldiers serving in Iraq. This project was just calling my name to needlefelt another sheep in the series started with my felted tea cozy earlier in the year. Here's a picture of the finished heart - below are pictures of it in progress. Hopefully I'll get this dropped off at the bank in the next two days.
Here is the wood heart I picked up at the bank - I painted the sides not knowing what I'd be doing as far as finishing them.
For the background for the heart I decided I wanted to felt some pink wool. I started out with wet felting some wool I had dyed but wasn't happy with that so I then moved on to knitting a blank which I then felted in the washing machine. It turned out great although it was touch and go on if it was big enough - just made it with a quarter inch to spare on the sides.
These are the flat pieces in black and natural I'm needlefelting to make the sheep's body. In needlefelting I use a needle with barbs that as it gets punched through the wool it felts it together.
Here I'm starting to felt the sheep body to the pink felted background. I cut out the shapes from the flat pieces of natural and black felt that I made.
Here is the piece after I've needlefelted the stems on using green wool. I've started felting the leaves on - I made them the same way I made the body felting 2 colors of green into a flat piece and then cutting the leaves out of it.
The heart is almost finished here - I just finished putting the needlefelted flowers on, last step was to glue it to the board and trim it up. 