GIVEAWAY WINNER:
The winner of the Complete Wet Felting Kit from Heidi Feathers is … Kirsty Lowde. Congratulations, Kirsty , please can you leave a comment on this post so I can pass your contact info on to Zoe so she can arrange to post it to you (you don’t need to post your email address, I can get that from the Admin panel!)

NATURAL WOOLS AND FIBRES
You might have seen my post on the forum last week about a wall hanging I made using natural coloured wool tops from many different wool breeds and some different embellishment fibres. Someone usually asks, so this time I’ve measured 🙂 It’s 30 inches long and 10 inches wide.

This is the bottom end, some of the wools and fibres are: Bluefaced Leicester tops and noil, Humbug Jacob, Black Jacob tops and noil, Lincoln, Gotland, flax, hemp, soy top, milk top and viscose:

This is a close up of the soy top and Lincoln tops.

And this is viscose tops on Zwartble with some Ingeo to the side.

As much as I love colours of dyed Merino or the textures of a nuno felted silk or shiny organza, I really love the variation of colours and textures you get with different combinations of natural wools and embellishment fibres. For as long as I’ve had natural wool tops and embellishment fibres I’ve been making various experimental pieces of felt with them, some just flat wet-felted, some combined with other techniques for a variety of surface designs or sculptural effects. When I got my recent World of Wool order and a few more breeds to try, I thought I’d also start to make a variety of small panels with the intention of maybe combining them into one large wall hanging some day. This is a panel I made using Manx Loaghtan wool tops and Bamboo staple fibre:

This is an angled photo of the panel I made with Grey Herdick wool tops and Hemp fibre:

And this last piece is something I made alongside the top stripey piece:

Thanks again to Heidi Feathers for the generous giveaway prize and prefelt pieces to try out.