I thought some of the recent scarves I’ve bought might make nice panels for the front of bags. I usually do a few samples when I get new fabrics, see how they felt at various sizes with different thicknesses of wool. This first piece attached ‘better’ at this size than it had when I tried a narrower strip. I think it’s viscose:

It has a nice texture:

These next 4 pieces are all silk. I wasn’t sure which colour of Merino to use with this, it was a toss up between ‘Mink’ and ‘Catkin’–a pale yellow. On its own it looks beige, so I chose ‘Mink’ , but now it looks more cream in colour so I might try a sample with the pale yellow 🙂

This was a difficult one to colour match too. I wasn’t sure whether to go for green or pinky purple. I decided on green, I didn’t have quite the right shade, but got as close as possible:

I used another piece from the same scarf, it might have been a panel from the bottom of the previous sample, this part definitely seemed like it’d be better with a pinky/purple shade. I chose the closest light purple I had, ‘Orchid’ I think, and used a bright pink underneath:

It’s funny how something looks a certain colour until you match it with something, then you see different colours more. This looked very pink, so I used a Salmon base, after felting, the beige seems very similar to the first piece and the lilac/pink/purples look similar to the previous piece. Maybe they’d work together in strips?

This is one of my favourite pieces. I think the scarf I tore it from is Polyester. This attached better than a narrower sample I tried too, it turned out much better than I thought. I tried to match the colours of Merino to the colours of the stripes on the scarf so they werent dulled by migration:

It has a really nice texture too:

Have you bought or tried out any new fabrics lately?