Part One: Crimped Nylon

I hadn’t used Nylon fibres in felting until I bought a few different types earlier last year. Recently, I’ve been playing around with them again. Nylon was developed as an alternative to silk and can be dyed with acid dyes the same way as wool or silk, so when I dyed some silk throwster’s waste recently, I also dyed some nylon. I’d only dyed the nylon in red, yellow and blue, so I stuck to using just red, yellow and blue merino aswell.

I layed out a couple of layers of the merino, then I blended different amounts of the nylon and merino colours to give more shades. It felt very fluffy to lay out, and I expected it to be spongy like the plastic fibre or at least be thick, but it wasn’t, and it felted really nicely, and feels very soft. There’s a shininess and ‘synthetic’ look to it if you tilt it in the light, it’s not obvious enough in this piece for the camera to pick it up though. It’s a nice fibre to work with, and the crimped parts can be used to good effect.

Here are some photos of the finished felted piece, and the lay out before felting. If you use nylon fibres in any kind of fibre arts/crafts, I’d love to see the results 🙂