We’re doing Nuno experiments at the well being centre for the next few weeks. The first week we made pieces with strips of fabric on top of two ‘standard’ layers of Merino tops. There are lots of different fabric strips of various fibres which attach differently. I chose a couple of fabrics I’d used previously-a kind of loopy, open weave scarf with 2 or 3 layers, and a piece of cotton gauze-and a couple of pieces I hadn’t which was a strip of viscose scarf and a strip from a charity shop dress. This is the whole piece:
They all attached really well. The open weave loopy fabric always has interesting results:
Top to bottom: Viscose scarf, charity shop dress, cotton gauze. These strips all had similar waves to their edges:
You can see on this close up there’s a lot of wool migration, though it’s more visible on the black part of the fabric, and less where the fabric is similar to the wool:
The 2nd piece uses the same sized fabric strips, and a couple are the same: the open weave, loopy scarf, and the purpley viscose scarf. This piece actually started about 50% bigger than the previous one, I laid out the fabric strips first, then added 4 very fine layers of Merino, which probably added up to being finer than 1 ‘standard’ layer of Merino (the average amount that gets pulled off from standard commercial wool tops, laid out you can’t see through it), and not as even. This is the whole piece after felting:
This is the back:
The fabric at the top is a piece from a charity shop sari (I showed some dyed recently), it feels like springy crepey chiffon! It created great texture:
The 2nd row is some fabric which was donated, it looks and feels like silk. After felting it looked kind of knitted:
