I made another piece of felt just for fun recently, this time using blue shades of merino wool and blue, green and purpley shades of fabrics and fibres.

I really love this part, it’s synthetic fibres from a novelty yarn, but looks like curly wool.

For the last 25 years or so, I’ve been using an old Singer sewing machine. The electrics were too dangerous, so I removed them and worked it by hand. It was slow going and gave me Popeye forearms (or ‘arm’, just the one on the right!) but it worked well enough for what I needed it for. When I started felting and the world of fibres and fabrics opened up, I started to covet other people’s fancy machines, especially ones that could do zig-zag stitch. I did occasionally think about buying myself a new one, but it seemed a bit frivolous to spend money on something just to add zig-zags to things occasionally 🙂 And then a couple of weeks ago, my Mum gave me her machine. I was worried that now I had a fancy machine I wouldn’t even be able to thread it, but it was quite easy really. I started off by practising straight stitches and trying to control the speed-I still can’t do that, it seems my foot only has two speeds, full pelt or excrutiatingly slow. But I managed to add stitching to a nuno sample I’d made. Feeling a bit more confident, I added some shapes from scrap felt, and finally used the zig-zag stitch

I’ve got a big collection of felt off cuts, so I cut a few into strips and made some bookmarks too

I know I need to practise a bit more, especially using zig-zags to do edges, but I’m not as scared of it as I was a week ago! Have you tried anything new recently?