Natural Wools and Natural Fibres
One of the projects I’ve been working on in the last few months is using natural coloured wools with natural ‘other’ felting fibres. It’s not always easy working out which fibre will match with which colour wool because they often look very different when felted, and some fibres which seem to felt well on most wools, suddenly don’t with another. A couple of natural fibres I really like are soybean fibre and flax (linen).
Flax looks like dried grass, it doesn’t look like it’d felt very well, but it does. I used it here with natural brown Merino tops.
After felting it is a lot softer and shinier than before.
Soybean top is gorgeous. It is soft, golden yellow and much shinier than silk. I used it with some natural black Jacob tops. After felting, I’d left it to dry on a table, and walking past, I saw the soybean top shining like gold in the dim light. I took a few photos hoping it’d show up and was really surprised when it did. It looked gorgeous. It wasn’t as easy to capture the true colour and shine once it had dried, but it really is a gorgeous fibre.
Do you have any favourite natural fibres and wool breeds?
9 thoughts on “Natural Wools and Natural Fibres”
Thanks Zed – just the nudge I need to try something different – I confess I am in a bit of a rut with the fibres I’ve been using!
I love the photo you snapped of the soybean drying – beautiful.
Thanks, Lyn 🙂
Interesting experiments . I’ve only wet felted with tencel and silk roving but I love to use corn and soy fibers for furring my animals . I don’t know why, but they both needle felt great and add a lot of texture and shine . I don’t know if it is true but I read some where that they are going to stop making the dyed soy fiber from ashland bay?
http://www.woolery.com/store/pc/Bamboo-Top-Natural-Dyed-8-oz-8-Colors-to-Choose-from-p9906.htm
They have some amazing colors but I just use the light and dark browns for my animals.
Thanks Denise 🙂
I don’t know about ashland bay, I pretty much only use World of Wool. They tend to mainly do natural colours, but they are very cheap.
Great experiments. I love the way no matter how straight a fiber is it is textured when felted.
Thanks 🙂
I like that too.
Wonderful samples!
Thanks, Ruth 🙂