Felted Rug for Outlands largess

I made this rug back in July for Their Majesties Konrad and Kortland to take with them to Pennsic for gifting. It was made with alpaca that was grown by Master Bjorn and Dame Jennet. Jennet tradedme for a couple of bags of her second cuts. I did all the processing once the animals were shorn, and I dyed the green, red and gold. The black and browns were the natural colors from the animals. While I understand that alpaca was not something in use for these rugs, I had access to it, so that beat out authenticity in this case. Also made for a lovely and soft rug.

I adapted a motif from one of the Noin-Ula finds, the large carpet in barrow 6 showing a stag. It happens to be being taken down by a gryphon. I left that part out. It didn't seem particularly hospitable as Artemisia's symbol is a gryphon and Outlands a stag.

As usual, everything I make turns out cute rather than elegant. I swear, the deer wasn't supposed to look like it had a cartoon smile.

This is after laying down pencil roving and yarns for details. Because I'm not a felting master, I freely admit to "cheating" by needlefelting some of the smaller details into place and lightly wet felting things in layers before the final hard felt. I also created some pieces of prefelt for things like the diamonds. The green and brown were laid down rather loosely and with only minor combing though. I was trying to keep it closer to the Mongolian methods of processing the fiber with sticks/ a felting bow type method. Then I ran up against time and went back to hand cards.

 You can see a bit of the texture here as it is spread across my kitchen table. Yeah, it's kind of large. About 7 feet long. I didn't intend for it to be quite that big, but had an accident where my son pulled large chunks out while I was felting it and I had to reassemble it and make it hold together, so it got a bit bigger. And then it got bigger than that.  I'm really happy with it though. It was lush and comfortable to walk on. From what I hear, the Queen of the Outlands was pretty pleased by it.