I am still working on ideas from the paint poured felt and fabric that I created for the first quarter challenge. I had several good ideas from the comments on my previous posts and I was thinking along the lines of stitching and then making the painted cotton into something else. But I couldn’t find a good tutorial on sewing a pouch with a zipper. I am hopeless with zippers and just couldn’t seem to make out what the instructions meant. Then someone on the forum asked about inclusions in felt and Karen of Lincs in Stitches showed us her wet felted pendants with acrylic paper inclusions.

What if I used the painted cotton fabric as an inclusion in felt? I love how our little community always helps me out, even if they don’t know it!

I decided to make a sample to see how it would work. I used two different colors in the layers. I didn’t want the top black layer to be so stark and I have found it’s easier to see where to cut out the inclusions if you have a little migration of color through the areas where the inclusions are not. The bottom layer is a mix of natural wool colors that is fairly coarse.

I cut a few pieces of the painted cotton and place them on top of the bottom layer.

The top layer is short fiber black merino and I added a gray embellishment fiber out of my stash. It’s not silk but I have forgotten what it is. Bad me for not labeling things better.

Then I felted it. You can see where the inclusions are because it is more black in those areas where the bottom layer fiber hasn’t migrated through.

Here’s the first inclusion showing through after cutting. The cotton got fairly wrinkled up. It adds texture but I decided I might like to see how it would work if I used a piece of plastic as the resist and then cut it open as above. But then I would remove the plastic and insert the painted cotton. That way it wouldn’t get all wrinkled up during shrinkage and I would know the exact size to cut it to fit inside the pocket. But that’s for next time.

Here’s the piece after it’s completely dry. The poured paint is a very nice contrast to the black wool. I may stitch around the edges to make sure it stays in completely. It won’t fall out but you could definitely grab it and pull out the painted cotton pieces.

Here’s a couple of close up shots so you can see the texture of the painted cotton against the felt. This technique has definite possibilities. This could certainly be used for making felt and paint jewelry or for adding embellishments to almost any kind of felt. I have quite a lot of poured paint that I need to do something with so there will probably be more experiments coming up.