Still Playing

I have been experimenting again. These are some of the felt pieces I 'painted' last week. It was time for the next step.



The instructions called for a fine tipped solder iron. Believe it or not Alan actually had a couple of irons for me to choose from. I carefully selected my tool and was ready to go.



Wait a minute. I din't know how to use one for soldering let alone for this. Back I went to Alan for a quick lesson.



I was a little surprised that the heat didn't make the felt sizzle and that the cut wasn't going to be clean and easy. It was quite a bit slower than I expected but this is probably a good thing. It gave my skills time to catch up.



The first piece I cut was a bit of a disaster. The cutting wasn't clean as I didn't hold the solder iron at the correct angle. I aslo struck another little hurdle. I had used some silk paper on some of felt pieces. The solder iron doesn't cut through it. Oh well, that's the reason I was experimenting. I began to place my metal templates around the silk paper. The green in this photo is the silk paper.






I tried lots of different shapes and sizes. Some worked better than others. One template had some inside shapes. These didn't work so well cause I couldn't get the tip of the solder iron at the right angle. A similar sized shape that I could trace on the outside of worked well. The blue triangles in this photo were a synthetic fabric. Solder iron cut through that with no problems.








This is the piece of felt from last week's post. Here I have cut the shapes avoiding the silk paper tiles. I also noted that when I was cuting through thick paint there was a bit of an odor.

In this photo I have removed the shapes and placed them into different spaces. I have also done that in the previous photos.

This last photo I have made some free hand marks on the shapes and the background felt. You are still using the solder iron however you are not trying to cut through. I cut right through the first couple of times but it didn't take long until I got the right touch.

The colour of the original felt makes a difference at this stage. Black makes a more dramatic mark. The colours I used were more subtle. This was fun and now I think I'm ready to have a go at creating a piece that might actually make it onto a wall somewhere.