Felt Jacket Cowichan knit Accentuation upgrades

Hello Needle Work Monday Community
Today I present to you a Cowichan knitted Jacket. This type of jacket knitting is from the Cowichan people of southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The unique heavy wool knitting with it's distinctively patterned and cut is a remarkable piece of Cultural Canada.
I have had this jacket for many years and decided to put a felt layer over top of this 100% wool. Many people have asked me about this jacket and how I did this project. I took the concept of felting and applied it to the wool already in the jacket, keeping to the pattern that it was knit in and to the style.

Here is the front of the jacket.

Left: The original tree pattern and original brown ground. These elements are accentuated by the wool and colour I chose. Right: The tree with a deeper wool colouring and the ground with dark green and light green.

The back of the jacket where the blue sky was filled in with Canadian wool. Felting this much area has made the jacket a lot warmer. Filling in all the knit holes has created a tighter knit and produces a thick felt layer. A few layers of wool is spread out and layered over the area and felting needles are used in a row to press the wool in.
The Caribou are accentuated with wool to bring them to a truer sense of what they look like in the wild. The ground band was felted to provide some grounding and colour, keeping with the original pattern.

<---- Left chest tree is the same size as the original tree, and felted inside the original given shape.

The left front breast Caribou and tree. Lightly felted more for affect on proper colouring not attainable by wool knitting.

Original Caribou and felted Caribou. You can see the difference of how the felted Caribou stand out with minor colour. I have dyed some wool black but am having issues with fixing this dye to the wool. If you know of a way to do so please let me know. When I sort out how to have the black not run I will felt the legs of the caribou and some of the rack (horns or antlers) with black wool mixed with an walnut brown I recently made.

The back and collar of the jacket. I took the liberties of adding a 3D mushroom what is commonly found on the Island where these sweaters originate. A semi tropical temperate climate on the island that is easily spotted in the fern forest of fog from the water held moist from the trees.
A close up of the 3D mushroom. The paintbrush is there to see how far popped out the mushroom is to provide some depth reference. The mushroom was put on to help the collar stand up and stay up rather then it normally folding over.
There is more work to be done on this piece and I shall keep the updates coming as I progress. It has taken about 30 hours so far in felting. I open or bend the stitches and felt inside the holes making this piece warm and well done. the felting of such patterns is fun but takes time and patients to felt inside the patterns to give respect to the original makers of this piece. The hand dyed wool is in the 50 hour mark but a lot of that time is cook, rest time, but constantly checking and poking the wool.

Thanks for taking the time to have a look at this project. I have more to do and will get more pictures and process pictures taken for the next post about this evolving jacket.