Sleeping Forest by Caela Conn Tyler

Sleeping Forest evolved from some sketches I did – sketches of a section of some woods in mid-January. On a somewhat gray day, at first glance the woods seem dead; devoid of color and life. But when you study the woods in order to jot notes regarding and describing textures and colors, you notice more, especially a rather unbelievable range of subtle hues. Of course you see browns, grays, taupes and countless combinations of these. Upon further observation, you discover the greens, blue-greens, and violet-cast hues of the lichen and the vegetation on the forest floor. How can a forest boasting such hues be dead? It's not … it's merely sleeping.

During the time I was sketching, I was also discovering a new "toy" – an embellishing machine. This contraption looks just like a sewing machine, however, instead of one or twin needles, it has seven needles in a tight circle configuration. The needles have tiny barbs at their tips. Amazingly, you use no thread! With the embellishing machine, you can integrate various materials (yarns, wool roving, bits of fabrics, even foil) into a ground fabric. While exploring the possibilities, I accidentally discovered that I could distort the ground fabric so that it stretched and raised up from the initial plane of the surface. I decided to explore the possibility of purposely creating this effect, choosing my sketches as the starting point.

After basting the tree shapes, I embellished the background felt using four colors of shredded wool roving. Once this was accomplished, I heavily embellished from the backside to force the light beige felt through to the front, curving the felt to create the convex tree trunks. The embellished ground area was created using cut bits of dyed scrim. Although the tree trunks were indeed convex, the curvature was fragile, easily changed to a concave shape with the poke of a finger. Therefore, I backed the felt with fabric, and padded the tree trunks with felt and fiberfill, blind stitching along the edges of the trunks.

The total starkness of the tall, straight tree trunks is relieved by the Y-shaped tree – a weathered but relatively young tree, short enough to have branches closer to the ground. I combined three colors of floss – two solids and one hand-dyed – to connect with the color and texture of the embellished tree trunk. Although I really loved the curves of the branches, I stitched the twigs using Brazilian couching technique. The sharp angles "spoke" to me and seemed to visually represent the brittleness of twigs in winter. As in my sketches, a few leaves remain clinging to the twigs. Tomorrow's wind might toss some of them to the ground. I used an ombre sheer fabric for the leaves to echo their temporary connection to the tree. (And, I just couldn't resist that bit of metallic glimmer in the fabric.) Managing the small bits of sheer fabric along with the smoke-colored invisible thread that I used to attach them was NOT fun! After experimenting with several possibilities, I used a limited amount of small, unobtrusive feather stitch in the ground area. The ground didn't need much, simply a hint of dormant vegetation.

This was a stretch – definitely out of my box, even out of the shopping bag that my box came in!