For a very few days each year the blue irises in our garden are in bloom while the marsh marigolds are still flowering. The complimentary colours of yellow/gold and purple/blue are wonderful to behold. We are enjoying a little heatwave just now so the other day I sat in the garden and did a little watercolour sketch of an iris. And today I set about making an interpretation of these flowers in felt. The first step was to select my colours of merino wool fibres. It was definitely a question of blending as nothing I had was quite right for the irises - which are somewhere between blue and purple. I decided on the inlay method - that is, make some pre-felt for the various components of the piece and cut them into the various shapes that I wanted. The process of painting the flowers is helpful because it helps to analyse how the flower is formed. The iris has three petals that point up into a peak, three smaller petals that spread out horizontally and a further three large petals