Working on a micro scale Kraken for the Burrinja Open Studios exhibition. Have switched to hand painted felt due to carpal tunnel doom from too much giant scale crocheting. Have been having a lot of fun with felting - am using pre made wool felt and dying it with food colouring using vinegar as a mordant. This has the advantage of being kitchen safe as there are no nasty chemicals involved (and me safe too I guess). The vinegar mordant can split or change the colours (especially purple) which can be a pain when you are after a very specific effect but on the plus side gives you an excellent sense of anticipation and surprise when you unwrap it after steaming.
Anyway after a whole heap of pondering and sketching I decided to base the Kraken on a Colossal Sqiud. Not least because I had seen the preserved one in Wellington - utterly amazing by the way.
Now I always seem to start off thinking I will create the pattern in one go but it never seems to work that way. I inevitably end up starting somewhere (often the toes) and building the scale of the rest of the creature in relation to that bit. In this case the tentacles have become the starting point and the rest will follow once they are all in place.
I knew I wanted the eight arms to be about a metre long but had a lot of trouble trying to figure out the diameters for the top and bottom and the amount of taper I needed. As a result I decided to make a test tentacle - I am often too lazy to make test versions and just tend to wing it but there is a very large amount of felt involved here not to mention all the hand painting.
Next time I will share the results of the first tentacle test and where it goes from there.
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