The other exiting thing is that a couple of weeks ago I wont the free give way from world of wool on face book. they sent me a grab bag of wool. The yellow and the purple seem to be silk but I am not sure because the didn’t label the different “balls”. It was a real surprise to win because I never will anything. the wools are great colours and will get put to good use.

I started with the largest piece that will be used on a project for an exhibition planned in October. This is the back side of the silk where I used preyarn to give a branching effect.

I then flipped the silk over and applied merino wool mixed with a variety of other fibers including silk noil, cashmere, angora, tencel, flax and banana fiber that I had carded into batts over the last month.

Next came the locks which I added randomly over the surface. These were hand dyed Wensleydale locks and they are pretty coarse so I was wondering how they would migrate through the silk. I used 5mm silk gauze that I had previously hand dyed.

Here are the end results. I got lots of texture which I really wanted.

This is the back side. You can see where the locks migrated through in the spots that look more yellow. No problems migrating through the silk.

My next attempt was with the prefelt. Here is the shape that I cut out and I used some silk I already had. I did think to myself, this is 8 mm habotai silk and I don’t know what kind of wool is in the prefelt as I made it several years ago. Will it work? You should always listen to yourself.

I covered the prefelt with another piece of silk and then felted the piece by rolling. The fibers were migrating but not very quickly and not evenly. I kept working at it but it was slow. Next time I do this it will be with 5mm silk gauze and merino prefelt.

Here is the result. I got a lot of ruching which is expected with 8mm habotai and all of the prefelt design is not attached. It would have worked better if I had listened to that little voice that warned it might not work.

Next up was the experiment with cheesecloth and prefelt.

The prefelt was another left over piece with unknown wool content. Here’s the cheesecloth. It’s 90# so pretty close weave for cheesecloth.

I ripped it into strips.

Laid it on the prefelt and then added a little bit of wool on the base of the cheesecloth that I wanted to felt in.

I then wet that section down and covered it with plastic.

Then I added another layer of cheesecloth and a bit more wool. Wet that layer down, covered with plastic and repeat.

These are all the layers ready to start rolling.

In the middle of felting, I did check the layers and did a bit of rubbing over the added wool.

And here’s the result. Layered cheesecloth in rows that have been nuno felted in to the felt. They are very sturdy and you can’t pull them off.

Here’s a side view where you can see the felt on the bottom. This would certainly have been simpler if I had just sewn the layers of cheesecloth down with the sewing machine. I’m not sure what the benefit of felting them would really be. But I guess on a three-dimensional piece that could not be sewn. it might be useful.

I enjoyed these experiments and have to think up some more ideas. I do have another idea floating around using Zed’s idea of nuno and resists that she showed earlier. Hopefully, I’ll have some time to try that idea out as well. Have you done anything for the nuno challenge? We’d love to see so please post it to Flickr or the forum.

I kept turning it around, folding it, measuring it. I made sure the piece of fabric I worked on was big enough for a book cover, but the finsihed piece was too thick for that. I turned it over, folded it again and measured a bit more, then decided I could make a book cover out of it if I cut it and used different felt for the inside flaps. So, more measuring, hunting for felt and sewing of felt to fabric. This is what the inside looked like before I’d quite finished the bottom edge:

And, this is what it looked like once all the edges were finished:

I’m not sure whether I prefer it with the red part on the front:

Or whether I like the blue better:

I had quite a good sized piece left over, and I actually really like the green part the best, so I thought I’d use it for a gadget/camera/phone case. This is one side:

And this is the other:

I don’t feel so odd now for saving all the tiniest bits of felt scraps ‘just in case’ 

Questions, ideas, head space

Just mainly thoughts today, or not

I know we’ve probably  had this conversation before but I do have so much trouble sorting out my ideas, my mind runs rampant sometimes with everything I want to do and I find it hard to make sense of it all. I don’t think theres a single day ( or minute) that goes by without me thinking of different ideas and sometimes  my head swims and its so frustrating that when I actually sit down to do something I go blank lol  I have so much trouble getting things out of my head

So my question is  how do you get your ideas from your head to work through your hands

I want to do everything and because of that everything gets so jumbled and then I get so annoyed and frustrated that I have walk away for a while,   I said to a friend once that I feel like I should open up the top of my head, let it all out , close it and start again lol  Wish i could do that, so how do you all do it.

I think I know the first thing Ruth will say and that’s   JOURNAL JOURNAL JOURNAL lol so yes im finally about to that, but first I have to make one that suits me and here it is ,  see the blank cover !!!!!!!!!!!!

After that little rant i have been just trying to make small things to keep me busy, our life is pretty stressed at the moment and i will explain that on the forum but for now here’s just some small things i did make !!

  This little box and books are from a tutorial by Luthian at her Altered Alchemy blog, i really love her work so i decided to try one of these, orginally in copper but i thought i’d try first with some card stock, its only about 1 inch big and i had fun, then had to make some little books to go with it, made from leather.

Then thanks to my friend i scored a piece of copper so made a real one, trickier but so much fun again

 Next i made a sheet of silk paper and then !!!

I wanted to make some sort of  book of it,   i used skewers for the binding and stitched in place

It has 5 pages and i have no idea what to do with it now lol i know thats not a good pic sorry,

So can you see my dilema,  if i could work on one thing at a time and get it finished properly i would be so much happier but i seem to flit from one thing to the next because i cant wait to try everything,     any thoughts !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It was a really nice venue with tons of good food and really nice rooms this is the courtyard where there where two magnolia trees in full bloom and a nice waterfall feature.

There were lots of things to buy in the vendor mall

There were some interesting classes.

This one was called Viking Knitting and I would have liked to take the class.

Unfortunately only 2 of my pictures of the displays turned out

the first is a cowl by  Mireille Gagnon Moes who got honorable mention.

the other one that turned out was this large felt leaf by Diane Gonthier.http://www.savoir-faire-textile.com/eng/ It was displayed laid out on the floor. I think about 5 feet long.

There was also a banquet with a fashion show and no of that turned out. it was dark and no one would stand still for a second to take the pictures. I was a failure as a photographer but I hope you like the pictures that did work.

I worked up the Power Point presentation over a month ago and it would have been fairly straight forward if I remembered how to use the program. But I hadn’t used Power Point in a number of years so it slowed me down a bit. I spent at least three hours putting it together and then I had to have someone else upgrade it to Power Point 2010. The equipment at the college seems to be a bit ahead of my Power Point 2003. I never see the point in upgrading software if it still works.

We headed down to Camas Creek Yarn as Paula works there and has an in for getting our supplies for the classes. The supplies are included in the cost of the class as that’s the way the college wanted it. In my prior classes, supplies were purchased in advance and just a supply list was given. So we spent several hours getting all the supplies together to put in bags so each student will have a “supply kit”.

Here’s Paula measuring out different colors of pre-yarn for the kits.

We were picking different colors to go with a variety of colors of roving. We needed 4 yards per pack but somehow got confused and started doubling the amount of pre-yarn we needed. Who knew counting was so difficult?

Next we added in some silk roving and silk hankies. So downstairs we went to figure out what colors would go with our color combinations we already had.

Here are the colors of silk hankies that we chose. Paula dyed these.

Then we set up an assembly line to make our packs. Each pack contains Imperial wool roving, silk hankies, hemp fiber, silk noil, pelsul locks, silk roving, merino roving, pre-felt and pre-yarn. We are going to be doing three projects in the class and there are probably enough embellishments to do 20 projects. But we thought the students would appreciate extra embellishments for later use at home.

These are all the supplies in one kit.

Here’s our pile of bagged kits. I am making a supply list that will be stapled to the bag. But I need to make up some business cards to go in them as well. I’m not sure why I don’t have any of those yet?? (I guess I don’t listen to my own advice after writing all those Marketplace Monday posts.)

Then Paula and I spent the rest of the day making samples for the class. We’re starting with a flat piece of felt with embellishments. This one is mine with a silk hankie, hemp, pre-yarn and pelsul locks.

This one is Paula’s. She always adds more embellishments than I do. She used pre-felt, silk roving, silk hankie, pre-yarn, flax, silk noil and pelsul locks I think.

Then we made felted soap. Mine’s orange and Paula’s is green.

And the last samples are felted rocks. Paula’s is on the left and mine is the hairy one on the right. All in all, we’ve spent around 12 hours preparing for a 6 hour class. This doesn’t include the time we’ll spend gathering up all the equipment needs, packing up the car and the preparations of setting up the day of the class. I like to be prepared, so I’m not complaining, just letting you know that the time a teacher spends is not just in the classroom. Hopefully, we’ll get enough students signed up for the class to run. Right now, we still have openings so if you’re in northwest Montana, we’d love to have you join us. Just click on the link in the first paragraph to sign up. 

Are you teaching classes? What are your thoughts about class preparation? Any tips for other teachers? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Do you take classes? Do you have suggestions for how teachers could be better prepared or suggestions for better teaching methods? We’d love to hear those too.

I used some slubbed wool I bought quite a few years ago to make the felt for this. I added some extra threads and bits of silk to the felt. I can’t find a photo of it, but this piece is very similar, and this is a close up of the texture.

I used a cream vintage button, and kept the natural uneven edges again for the back pocket.

The other purse I worked on was one made from a piece of felt and squares of silk paper. It was one of my favourite pieces, the silk squares are so shiny. I’m still undecided about the button, I’m thinking of using this vintage one:

This is the back:

And the inside, I like these purses with two pockets because you get to see more felt than on the zipper ones:

The other thing I worked on last week were some collage sheets. I’m working on designs for sheets to sell on etsy and maybe even do some designs for fabric through Spoonflower and some printed silk. I hoped I might get some feedback on the designs, so I’ve made some samples and uploaded them here. Feel free to print them and use them, but please don’t sell/redistribute the designs.

Here they are putting the wool around the edges.

Then laying out the pattern.

Close up

Fixing a spot that didn’t take. We needled it down and gave it a little rubbing on both sides and it was all fixed.

Finished scarves

And the happy ladies with their scarves and a sample done on cotton that they had time to do at the end of class.

At the last minuet the needle felting teacher had to pull out with a family emergency so they asked me to fill in. I didn’t take any pictures of the process we only had 3 hours to complete a project so we really had to move.  Here they are at the end, happy with their projects. Four sheep ( I supplied the legs so they would have time to complete them. ), one pincushion flower and a little person.

All in all it was a great time with lots of friendly people. I will share more about the conference in another post later.

The supplies needed are ice, cotton or silk fabrics, fiber reactive dye powders, soda ash, water, a container for the soda ash liquid, a container about gallon (3785 grams) sized to dye in, dust mask, gloves and a spoon to apply dyes. I have not tried this method with acid dyes but it would probably work. You would just need to steam the fabric before rinsing it out.

The first step is to mix 1 cup of soda ash with a gallon of water, stir until dissolved. Place all your fabric in the soda ash water and soak for at least 30 minutes. Take your gallon container, glass jars work really well for this, and place a layer of ice on the bottom of the jar. Put one piece of fabric on top of the ice and just squash it down into the jar. Put more ice on top of the fabric. With your gloves and dust mask on, sprinkle about 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon of dye powder over the ice. We used 2-3 colors per layer.

Place another piece of fabric on top of the dye powder layer. Put more ice on top of that fabric and sprinkle more dye powder on top. Keep layering fabric, ice and dye powder until the jar is full. I used reds, blues and blacks in the jar seen in the photo above. You can use any colors that you wish.

You can see Carole layering her fabric, ice and dye powders.

Bunny used a large dye pot to work in and it worked just as well as the glass jars. Plus it holds more fabric so you could do larger pieces easily this way.

Once your jar is filled to the top, do a last layer of ice and dye powder and then close with a lid. If you don’t have a lid, use plastic wrap over the top. Then set the container aside for 24 hours. The ice will melt and the dye powders will mix with the melting ice and dye the fabric with fantastic patterns.

Here are my two jars after melting for 24 hours. The hardest part is not disturbing the fabric. Pour out the excess dye liquid and then rinse the fabric. I rinsed three times in cold water in the sink and then put the fabric in the washing machine with a small amount of Synthropol and washed with a regular wash cycle. Then iron the fabric. 

This is one of the pieces of fabric that was at the very bottom of the red and blue glass jar. It’s very dark but I think it will be really nice with stitching using a light-colored thread on top.

I used a variety of small pieces of cotton of various weights that I had handy. 

This is 90# cheesecloth and this is just a small portion of it. It dyed beautifully. You could also put cotton thread in the dyeing jar but I didn’t have any white thread to try. You can also over dye fabrics this way so if you have a fabric that you don’t particularly like, try over dyeing it with this method.

I loved this one. It was on the very top of the red/blue jar.

This was some cotton muslin that was stitched together prior to dyeing. It reminds me of sunlight through the tree tops.

The ice melting really gets different reactions of the dye with the fabric than you can get in other methods. This works with snow too but for those of you that rarely get snow, ice is simple and gives good results.

The colors will be lighter if you use less dye powder and darker with more dye powder. You can mix a variety of colors or not. The results will always be different and you won’t be able to duplicate your results but that to me is the best thing about this method. Each piece of fabric will be unique. I didn’t have any silk but this will work with silk as well. I think this method would be really good to use on silk that will then be nuno felted. 

If you try out ice dyeing, please post photos on the forum or on our Flickr group, we’d love to see how it worked for you.

This is one of the camera cases I’ve been working on. The gray fibre is carded silk carrier rods. I blended some of the silk ‘fluff’ with merino and used some for surface texture.

I mentioned last time that I had one more felted piece using the pink synthetic fabric. It isn’t really meant to be anything but an experimental piece, combining nuno techniques and using a resist. This is a compilation of images.

Another experimental piece I did was one using some crimped acrylic fibre that looks like a synthetic version of laps.

It produced a really nice effect.

I have managed to finish off a few pieces and must get them photographed for listing on etsy. This ring pouch is one piece I finished. I first made some heart ring pouches a few years ago so I had somewhere safe to put my rings and bracelets when I take them off for felting. I’ve made a few more for gifts. They’re only small, about 2 inches high and 2.5 inches wide, this photo makes this one look huge!

If any of our UK readers use a lot of fabrics (I know we have some who are doing City and Guilds courses) you might be interested in a post I did on my blog the other day, about Abakhan, the fabric/craft shop I buy most of supplies from. I’m always interested in learning about others though, so if you have a favourite, feel free to share it, we all benefit from others’ experiences, especially if it saves us money