Kazak Star Felting Complete

my first stranded color work and felting project is now complete! Below is the mess that resulted when I was trying to work with all 5 colors in the same row. I tried to do this with the Fair Isle method, but eventually realized that the Fair Isle technique of carrying all the colors along the entire row really only works well for 2 or maybe 3 colors, any more than that is just too much yarn to mess around with.
by the middle of the piece, I switched to using just the minimum colors needed to make the background pattern, finished the entire piece and then went back over it using the duplicate stitch method to fill in the additional colors (like the purple middle stitch and yellow outlines). Overall this worked much better.
After I got it all seamed together came the fun part of felting it. I simply put it into the washing machine hot water, put a towel in for additional agitation and balance and then let it go through the normal wash cycle. Next time I will probably put it into a mesh bag and stop it before it goes into the spin cycle, but on this go round it worked out just fine with my "let er rip" approach.

The bag came out feeling like it felted properly (no pun intended), but it was really "furry" and so I took a shaver and trimmed off the excess "fur".
this is just one side's worth of removed fur.

and Viola! the finished product, looks pretty damned good if I say so myself.