Maker Spotlight: Lisa Stone

We love featuring things that are a little different on our Maker Spotlight, and this month is no exception!  We've been following Lisa and her sandworm project for a few months and we can't wait to share it with you from her perspective...

I'm Lisa Stone, I live in Weymouth, Dorset, I have a Fine art degree and I work under the name Rosie & Butch (named after my familys dogs). I started needle felting a few years ago when I came across it on a random Google search. I had never seen it before and thought it looked like a cool thing to try, so I ordered a few needles and some wool and I made a small dog. Ever since then I have been hooked. Over the years my projects have grown in size and difficulty. I am a child of the 80's so most of my projects are inspired by 80's movies. I have made various characters from my favourite movies over the years, and I normally make the bad guys as they are the most interesting.

The sandworm was made to be shown in the lobby the the Plaza cinema in Dorchester, to promote the new Beetlejuice movie. Originally my idea was to make some sandworm rugs to display in the lobby but I couldn't get the idea of making a needlefelted sandworm out of my head, so I placed my order with World of Wool for 10kg of Faroe Island wool to use as the core of the sculpture and mainly used carded Corriedale for the colour.

As soon the the wool arrived I got felting. With each sculpture I make I don't have a pattern or a plan, I just get stuck in and start off with a small amount of wool and felt it layer by layer to build up the sculpture.

The first part I made was the jaw of the sandworm. I made a large flat triangle from my core wool and then added more wool to create the shape of the head and neck. I then went on to make the outer head of the sandworm, again starting off as I did with the inner head with a flat triange. When they were done I felted the two pieces together. I didn't really have a plan of how big it would be, I just trusted the process and kept on adding layers until I thought it was big enough.

The sandworm in the movie is huge and obviously I couldnt make a 1:1 scale as it is in the movie as it's the size of a house, but I did want it to be big enough so that it was imposing as it is in the movie. I used a large dowling rod to hold up the main part and felted the wool around the dowl. All in all I used approx 15-20kg of wool and it took me 5 months to make. This is definitely my biggest scuplture to date.

The sandworm is now on display in a pub in Weymouth called Sticks & Bones. They have kindly let me display my work in there. They also have my Predator torphy head there, and I will hopfully be adding more pieces to display over time so if you're ever on holiday in Weymouth please do go and see them. I have got a lot of ideas of what I would like to make next, one of them is a life size sculpt of the character Darkness from the Ridley Scott movie Legend. His horns are about three foot long so I will definitely have to plan out how to make that one.

You can find Lisa on Instagram here and Etsy here.  There's also an article in the Dorset Echo, too!