A couple of months ago we had a really interesting guest post from Zara about felting with Swedish wool breeds. She kindly sent me some batts to try for myself, and they were all breeds I hadn’t tried before. The first one was Rya, which ‘have a short, fine undercoat and a long, lustrous, wavy to straight and rather coarse outer coat’. I embellished my samples with black Bamboo tops and White Viscose tops, I liked this photo of it on an angle as it shows the contrast between the matte bamboo and shiny viscose:

Just like Zara’s sample, my felted Rya made a nice thick, firm and hairy piece of felt. This close up of an area of bamboo tops shows it in more detail:

The second piece I made was using Svea X Finull, emnellished with some flax and hemp. This made a nice firm piece of felt, a lot softer and less hairy than the Rya:

As you can see from the photo above, the flax and hemp don’t stand out very much. This is a close up of some flax:

And a close up of some hemp:

The last piece I made was the Jämtland, embellished with soy tops and Milk protein. The Jämtland made a nice firm felt, but much softer than the Svea X Finull.

This is a close up of some of the Soy with some Milk near the bottom

I’m not used to using batts and found the finer the breed, the less ‘accurate’ I was with laying them out, getting thinner, lacier edges.
I bought a couple of scarves recently for nuno felting and took a few pieces to the well being centre last week to try out. The blue pieces are from a polyester scarf and the green flowery one in the centre is linen. I was surprised when I saw the label because it looks a lot like many viscose scarves I have, which look similar to silk chiffon, but shinier. I thought they looked nice together:

I love this texture:

I also love the tangley texture more open weave fabrics create:

Apologies for the late post, my Dad turned up unexpectedly demanding a cup of tea and entertaining for a couple of hours 🙂