I’m still coping with our current crisis by staying firmly planted in fantasy land. In exploring needle felting I decided to make a dragon. This was a little different to making the fairies as I had no firm idea of what my dragon should look like. I looked at some reference pictures for inspiration, but it mostly just evolved. Just as with the fairies, I began with a wire armature.
Wire armature for dragon - and yes, my table is a complete mess!
I learned a lot from making this creature. One thing I will never do again is make the feet out of wire. Its so hard to cover the wire with a small amount of wool. I’ve seen information on the internet about using wax to fix wool over wire for bird claws, I’m thinking that’s the only way to go with this. My dragon feet turned out to be stumpy things, hard to shape with the wire to stab around. I like having the wire in the tail for posing, but again its awful trying to needle felt around that wire.
Ooh, a nekked dragon….
I used white core roving wool to create the shape of the dragon, and then added thin layers of colored wool. This was harder than I anticipated because as you can see in the armature picture I only had tiny amounts of the colors I wanted to use. I bought that bundle of colored wool samples to see what it was like, but there’s not enough of any one color to make anything substantial.
This was the first time I had really tried to decorate, or make patterns on felted wool using thin strands. It was surprisingly easy, and I ended up giving the dragon a flower “tattoo”! The eyes are tiny black beads sewn into place. It was fun to “sculpt” the face adding brow ridges and nostrils. The wings are made from Tulle, wired along the top edge and decorated with splashes of colored acrylic Iridescent medium. the dragon went though several stages of being quite dinosaur like, then a lot like a hairy horse, but it got there in the end. It’s not perfect. I’m sure I’m still not felting the wool enough, but at least I’m hardly stabbing myself at all now!
It’s a very friendly dragon, even has a name “Serenity” - fitting companion to my “fairies”.