This week's inspiration image is spectacular fungi taken on a walk during lockdown last year.
I've been wanting to make a stumpery for months, since a visit to Ickworth house in the autumn, where I got to wander through their stumpery.
I've got no space for a real stumpery, so I'm making a textile one instead. This is the first piece! I made a back ground using layers of canvas, prefelt, and fabric and lace scraps (the lace I coloured with fabric pen), which I hooped up in a small embroidery hoop.
I had an old cardboard tube for the trunk base, so I marked out the measurements of the tube onto the prefelt before layering the fabric and lace on top. I used seed stitch and strong sewing cotton to stitch the layers together, and to add some bark like texture. The fungi (velvet shank according to the Wildlife Trust) was made with some scraps of felt I had left over from a wet felting project. They were the perfect colour and texture, and when stitched to the tree bark they formed great fungi. Just goes to show you should never chuck anything away.
Once I'd added the fungi I took the work out of the hoop and trimmed the edges to 1cm more than the length of the tube, so I had a selvege edge. I wrapped the work around the tube and stitched the back together. I tucked the edges under, leaving the bottom edge unstitched so I can work it into the final stumpery later.
I swirled some slightly stripy fibre into a circle around my finger, to replicate tree rings, and needle felted it to the prefelt at the top of the tube.
It's now ready to be added to my stumpery, once I've figured out what the base of the stumpery is going to be.
Next week's inspiration image is below.
