Texture With Natural Wools

It was interesting to see Marilyn’s 3rd Quarter Challenge last week about creating/adding dimension to our felt projects, we’d just started exploring dimension and texture at the well being centre’s wet felting and fibre group. The piece I made last week doesn’t really qualify as it’s something I’ve done before, but I thought I’d show it in case it gives a bit of inspiration for someone else.

We started with a couple of ‘regular’ thickness layers of medium coarse wools, like English 56 or Texel. I used a blend I’d made from some Botany lap waste and donated wools. We then added some ‘filling’ to help bulk our pieces out, mostly some scoured Norwegian lambswool and some unravelled aran knitting yarn (80% wool, I think). Then we added a couple of thinner layers of Merino, roughly the equivalent thickness of one coarse layer, we did two finer ones to keep even shrinkage. We topped them off with different silk embellishments like hankies, silk noil, cocoon strippings and ‘schappe silk‘ which I got from wollknoll. We started felting as usual, and once it was felted, we sewed running stitch across in different places, then pushed the felt together to ‘ruche’ it and form ridges. Then we finished felting a bit more and fulled it until it was as firm as we liked. Then we removed the sewing thread. This is how the back of mine looked:

This is the front:

This is it the other way around:

I had to take some photos along the surface of course, this is from one end:

And this is from the other end, it’s funny how it looks different rotated:

Yesterday we had a bit of a play-day using the different natural wools and fibres. It’s not the best place for photos, in the basement with unusual lights, and these are all still wet. This is Louise’s piece:

This is Ruth’s, she was pointing out the cotton nepps while we were talking about them:

Lyn has made a design on her piece so was still working on it, but it’s rude to leave her out!:

And mine, I used some Ryeland which I think Leonor sent, so it’ll be interesting to see how that dries:

One of the other art/craft groups at the centre is doing something about nature with a local school, and we might join in with that, so our dimension and texture exploration might have a bit of a nature theme over the next few weeks.