I thought I’d make some test pieces for making cards for the Winter fair. Basically, I wanted to work out the best wool and/or fibre blends for making wool tubes to look like tree trunks. I did have silver birch in mind for some, but anything which looked good was all I was after for now. The wool I used for the base was something I got in a bag of Botany Lap waste, It looked and felt like Merino, and after felting I’m failry certain it is, but finer than 23 mic.
I quite like this first one, I used various natural grey blends, but also some nylon on the 1st, 3rd and 5th. I think the first one was made with ‘Lightning’, an artifical white Merino, it looks blue-ish in natural light:

I used a natural blend which Leonor sent me for these next ones. I think the last two also had some white nylon because they have a blue-ish look too:

This is one of my favourites, it has tubes made from various natural blends, though the first one could have some artificial white. I also added some strands at the base after googling ‘tree trunks in snow’ 🙂 What isn’t very obvious is I also used a fine layer at the bottom of a Botany Lap blend which had trilobal nylon in it. It looks whiter/brighter if you look hard, but the sparkle isn’t obvious:

I tried a couple of tubes I made around dowelling, I think they were a bit thin and didn’t have enough colour variation:

I tried a new (to me) wool for this next piece: Charollais. It made a spongey felt. It was quite unusual when it came to fulling, as I rubbed from one direction, like top to bottom, it seemed to undo the fulling I’d done from the other, i.e side to side! I got there in the end, though I probably shouldn’t have bothered! The cream/white wool used on the grey tubes matched the base felt, so ‘diasappeared’, and the tube I made from Finn and Merino just had no definition:

Here’s a close up so you can see the felt texture:

I tried something a bit different on these next two, this first one has the same fine Merino base, but I made the trees out of bamboo paper. A layer of black, with a layer of white on top. The black bamboo paper had two layers, it separated when I was adding out the last tree, and I think that one looks better:

Close up:

This last one was made with a base of Svea X Finull which Zara sent me. I am hopeless at laying out anything which isn’t commercial tops, so it’s not the neatest piece! I tried a skeleton leaf on this one:

I really liked this piece 🙂 Here’s a close up of the leaf:

I’ll probably redo the samples with 23 mic Merino and add unblended trilobal on some to see if it looks like icy snow. I’ll save the artificial white wool for other things, I think the natural creamy whites look better.

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