Summertime blues and a creature that likes it colder than I do

With a spate of hot days here in Australia I'm afraid my ability to do anything goes out the window. Heat causes a lot of my health problems to get a lot worse and I've just not had the brain to do anything.
Both Ruth and I have a lot of trouble with the heat and we're not able to have an air conditioner here in the cottage so things pretty much crawled to a stop this past week.

For now I'll look back at one of my most successful needle felting projects. A friend of ours is totally in love with Polar Bears. I decided to needle felt her one for birthday/Christmas present.

It took me a lot longer than I thought it would but most of my needle felting projects at that point had been rather small like the teeny sheep.
The Polar Bear was slightly bigger than my fist.

I started with a pipe cleaner armature and from there built it up until I could get the right shape.
A felting needle has barbs along it and when you insert it into wool it tangles the fibres together. You can use this to create a 3D sculpture or to felt wool in to a piece of felt to create a 2D picture.
Unfortunatly this project was done at a time when my good old Konika-Minolta stopped working (Well it was the lens that went but I couldn't afford a new one)  so there aren't any progress photos.



I looked at a fair few photos to try and get the shape right. I didn't realise until I was part way through the project how few photos there are of Polar Bears from above.



By coincidence, while I was still working on it, we ended up seeing part of a Polar Bear documentary and although I was really sick with a migraine that night I saw enough from various angles to be able to correct the anatomy a bit.



I'm not completely happy with his paws. The toes aren't really long enough but by that point I wasn't able to fix them.



Over all though I was very happy with the completed bear. He has a great personality that shines through and our friend was over the moon with him and that's what counts.

I am available for needle felted sculpture commissions. Something of this size and complexity would cost a couple of hundred dollars. If you are interested you can email me at wallflowerarts@gmail.com for more information.