I was surfing the web the other day and saw a video about making origami stars. Like this one.
I thought, I bet that shape would work with felt too. I can make a pentagon. I did this during our March break. The schools are closed for a week. iws going to do this at home but then thought what the heck it’s a small project and Monday is our socials at the guild. I knew Jan would be there early and so would some others. I packed some wet felting gear, resist and wool into a bag and headed in.
I cut 2 pentagons of different sizes to use for the stars. I am using this blue underlay that I don’t really like. It’s thinner and flimsy and it holds water. I thought it would be good for this project because I wasn’t planning on removing the resist, it would just stay inside bunched up.
I cut out the resist and covered it in wool. I moved the first sides off and did it again. I then flipped it over so I could wet the wool and wrap it around. I don’t know who else does this but I like to lay all the base wool out dry first and then put it back together. If you press and wiggle the dry wool even for something much larger like a hat then you can pick it up to move it and it will all stay stuck together.
I am using Mallard green wool for the base.
Because I was somewhere where I needed to be neat and not splash water all around I used a sponge to get up the extra water from wetting out. I usually don’t bother as my studio floor can get wet without causing a problem so enjoy this rare picture of me being neat.
Then I added some sari silk in the Wildflower colourway. It is mostly yellow with black and red bits. I grabbed a primarily yellow section for the star.
Then it was the usual rubbing and rolling and fulling until it was shrunk and feeling sturdy. I wasn’t expecting a lot of shrinkage because the wool staple was as long as the resist or longer with the small one. I think if you had some short fibre or cut this fibre in half you would get more shrinkage.
After rinsing and squeezing them as dry as possible I reshaped the pentagons and made the star shapes by pinching the corners and adding clothespins for them to dry.
These are the finished stars.
After they were dry, I decided to cut the bigger one and take the resist out. It held its shape of course. That got me thinking about how a larger one would make a good pillow. The other thing a larger version or one with short fibre would do is let you pull the points to make them longer. It wasn’t possible with these as I would be pulling on both ends of the same fibre.
so far I have had several suggestions on what they could be used for. the first I got was to make them thin, then put LED lights in them to make a hanging sting of lit stars. Another was to put cat nip in them ( I will credit Jan but there were several that suggested this). A teacher suggested that they would make great fidget toys when I leave the resist in, they squish but bounce back. I am thinking they are also silent. I am sure that would be a big plus.