Felting and Fiber Studio

It has been a while since I had regular time to felt, because of different reasons. In my mind, that is almost as if my whole artistic life was on hold, because I believe that it is that regular time that nourishes you, it allows you to both go on with what you usually do and also try out new stuff: both of those two things are important, because I want to be better at what I already do, but also to learn new things and explore without pressures. It often happens that a new idea leads to another when you are exploring, and sometimes this leads to great pieces and you advance towards new landscapes.

Unfortunately, as I was saying, I do not seem to be able to carve out a regular time each week for art at the moment, but I still think about it. Sometimes, my thoughts seem to go in circles without the outlet of the actual making: I do not know if this happens to you as well? It is the making that frees me to go on to a different idea, and may open up the circles, so to speak.

This time, I wanted to make something that would visually express the complexity of our thoughts, sometimes revolving around an idea again and again. Sometimes an idea may have to go through that complex mulling about it until some part of it grows and develops enough to bring a solution that kind of springs out of all that thinking.

So, I started with an idea of circle: to be honest a practical consideration also came into it, because I bought a couple of square frames at a bargain price a few years ago, and I wanted to make something that could fit in that square frame. In the end, the finished work is too big for that frame, because I did not measure beforehand, so never mind, but the idea was there.

Anyway, I set up my background a bit unusually for me as a circular shape with three layers of natural white mysterious wool that I got as part of a World of Wool offer on lap waste. It is definitely wool and not synthetic, a bit coarser than Merino, but very easily wet felted (so no core wool or any of the coarser wools for needle felting). (I sure wish that they put a name on the different stuff that is in their lap waste bags, because I am having to puzzle it out if I want to make a good use of it all! oh, well). I liked the fact that I could finally use that and loved the idea of a natural white background to start with.

Fine, up to this moment it was easy, but that was only the background: I had to chose what to do next, ha ha, that was the hard part!

I kept thinking about circular ideas, circular thoughts, thinking in circles, convolutions: I decided to go for a raised effect that could make apparent this movement in circles. I thought about folds, but then I discarded the idea, as I did not have enough time that day and it takes ages to work on felting folds jutting out of a flat surface! I mean, you must have seen quite a few artworks with that kind of well felted folds: the effect is amazing, but how many work hours are we talking about there? A lot of the big and better artworks of that kind are not even made by one person, they are felted by a team! Obviously, I am not in that league at the moment.

Even though I had made not a big background shape, I needed to keep it easier and quicker than folds..or maybe I needed an easier and quicker way to make folds! That is when I thought about using ready-made folds, so to speak: maybe I could skip the part about making the folds if I had strips of prefelt or felt from previous projects to add! Great, and I could lower my ‘in-case’ stash a bit: all those bits and bobs that I keep from other projects because maybe they will come handy in something else, you know.

The only problem was that I wanted to make something that would match well with the natural colour of my circular background, and I could not see in my prefelted anything that would go well with it, apart from a recent left-over prefelt in various greens (from my Christams card exchange!): too many colours, almost nothing in natural white or close. I debated with myself if I wanted to start making some prefelt for this work, but I decided against a two-day effort: I just could not know if I could find enough time to finish it, once I had to leave it incomplete.

Then, I remembered about the decoration on the wetfelted Merino shawl that I made years ago for my daughter’s First Holy Communion: it is one of the first works that I have made, and I had recently took it out and thought about how I had not used much that idea in other works. Basically, you make lightly felted ropes that you then attach to your background base: in that shawl I attached them by needle felting on the wetfelted shawl and used them to make a decorative abstract lotus flower shape. As I planned to make the ropes only lightly felted, I felt quite confident that I could wet felt them to the background instead of needle felting them.

I decided that I would put strips taken from my green left-over pre-felts as accent of colour in the composition, and catching visual point of interest where the eye would be drawn to. The rest should be muted in colour, so as not to distract too much from the green.

I took a big breath before starting to make the cords, as I had made ropes to use as straps and stuff for other projects, so I have a good idea of how much time it takes to make one: I mean, for lightly felted cords not as long as you would put into well felted folds, but still quite a bit!

I also needed more than one muted colour, to have some kind of play, otherwise that would be too flat, even using the 3-D effect, and I am quite out of natural white wools at the moment: I was supposed to replenish my stash but I never got around to do it! But I had the perfect solution right there: I could use the same lap waste mysterious natural white wool of the background, mixing it with some other colour as needed, and it would also felt in that much better being the same as the one on the background.

I used three main neutral coloured additions, plus the basic natural white:

I wanted the ropes to look a bit like brain convolutions, because we are talking about thoughts here, but to also hint to movement and paths. I wanted them to have a rhythm and I tried to give them rhythm both by their colour and by their position and the shape I made with them on the background.

I am afraid that I did not take many more photos while making the ropes, as I realised that I was very late in my schedule and I had to get on with it if I wanted to finish not too late. Anyway, I can tell you that it took me ages, and I was soon scratching my head about why I had thought that could be a quick job! I also found it soooo boring, apart from the short time that I was actually putting the cords in place (that was fun). Making cords is a pretty repetitive task, especially if you have only 4 colour options.

I wanted the circular movement to be resolved and maybe broken by the green strips, in the same way a plant can grow out of a seed or of soil, forced out by all the life of the soil and part of it at the same time. The green parts feel very positive, and they are reaching out from the closed circles to make a movement that is fluid but not circular, or not only circular, extending from the inside towards the outside of the circle, and from in to up.

That thought made me think about plants growing, and our own growing: it felt very fitting at this time in my life and in my family life to be thinking about growing, in relation to myself, to my family and to any individual, and as an abstract concept relating to all life on earth both in a physical and spiritual sense. Here, I found the right title for this finished piece: ‘Growing’.

That gave me the idea for adding a small lime tree seed pod that I had picked and kept for a while in my drawer of bits and bobs: I particularly like that tree, and I felt that it fits very well in this work. It also helped filling the upper white bit with a meaning and a small point of colour.

I used my Makita sander to rub everything horizontally, vertically and diagonally: I thought that it was going to take a lot of time to felt the cords and the strips in, but it was actually quite easy, possibly because I used the same type of wool for the cords as for the background?

Then I rolled the work a few times in all directions, being careful not to be too rough with it: I was very worried about the seed pod, but all went well and it withstood the rinsing as well.

You will maybe notice that there are a few cords not well attached in the right upper part: I will need to needle felt them a bit, to make sure that they stay put, but I have not gone around to do that yet!

As to the green bits that I used, I liked how they felted in. They were left-overs from the Christmas card exchange 2024: I am glad that I prepared more pre felt than I actually needed, you never know. I have a lot more ready to use in other projects.

I hope that you like ‘Growing’ as is, because, though I had thought about making a second work to pair with it, I do not think that I will want to make many more cords, at least not right now!

This will be a kind of hold-all post, a jumble bag of works completed and not, none of them good for a full post but maybe all together they can make a good photo of my Autumn 2024.

I will start with an abstract that I had felted earlier on, but that I have completed only this Autumn: this will be a bit of a leit-motif of my Autumn, as I tended to try and finish a few projects started months ago.

I had it there waiting fro inspiration for a while, because I was not happy with it. I asked for suggestion to the fabulous FFS group of friends, and they suggested that I tried my ideas on a transparent paper superimposing it on the felt, to gauge the effect before committing to stitching or changing things. I just had a clear florist plasticky sheet from a bunch of flowers that I had received and I could use it for that: it worked a treat to help me think about additions that I liked.

I also felted a few new artworks, sometimes just for the fun of it and trying to use colours and lines/shapes that are unusual to me and make me go out of my comfort zone.

I was pretty satisfied with that one, but not as much with this, that also uses unusual colours and silk handkerchiefs:

For some of the works that I felted in this time, I do not have photos, as I felted them for me and sometimes I do not think that they are finished yet.

I also started working very early on ideas for the FFS Christmas card exchange: I wanted to have plenty of time to think about it. I sketched some ideas with felt tip pens for bright colours and bold lines, looking for making traditional themes a bit more abstract.

I started with a Christmas tree, because it is maybe easier!

In the end, I preferred the first option, with a few adjustments, and set up to make prefelt in different greens, with different fabrics, threads, yarns, and fibers in them, for variety.

I tried out the position of the prefelt strips that I had cut against the drawing.

I also prepared the white Merino prefelt for my card, that I wanted made of two sides. I already had the red prefelt for the baubles, a left-over from another project, that very conveniently had a blue silk side that provided a little bit of  shading in the finished stage. I decided to make the tree point with a bit of yellow silk fabric from a scarf, so I could shape it a bit like a star: very traditional.

So, I felted the different bits all together on the white background:

At the same time I got to work on ideas for the second side. It was a bit harder to come up with a simple enough Christmassy idea, but I finally decided on a traditional robin, mainly because I was itching to use some bright orange locks that I really love and can’t find a place to use in.

It was a bit discouraging, because some of the people that I was consulting on which one was best were not even able to recognize the robin as such, meh! Anyway, I liked the idea of the robin and decided to go on with the actual felting.

I wanted to give some more bling to it, so I added some stitching with a white shiny DMC thread. On the tree side I stitched some diagonal lines in shiny white over the tree, adding crossed stars as additional decoration at the end of the branches. I also added French knots with the same shiny thread as falling snow on the white background.

I decided that I wanted to make a small pouch of them: one could use it as decoration or something, and I added a small bag of Christmassy pot-pourry in it, so it could be used as aroma diffuser as well, in a sense. So I stitched a pressure button in it and a small red velvet handle to hold it.

Another small project that I tried is to make myself a small decorative collar. I was not totally satisfied by the results.

I used black Merino as background and mulberry silk in bright colours as accents: the silk was actually eaten by the wool much more than what I thought (maybe because I used my sander to speed up the job), so the final effect was less colourful that I wanted.

I also happened to needle felt some small things, such as this small pumpkin while I was waiting somewhere: you can tell that we were close to Halloween!

One thing that I am doing is stitching a few things, and I have some more stitching waiting for me when I will be finished with the ones that I am doing at the moment.

I am stitching a bowl that was born as a failed hat (!) and that I am using now as a slow stitching sample: first I stitched the side with the yellowish eri silk using a simple design in synthetic yellow thread found at a charity shop.

This is the felted bowl that I am stitching inside and outside

I seem not to have any photo of the bowl stitched with the yellow thread, so I will just explain it here: at the center there is a circle that is partially doubled. Then, a bit further out from it there are vertical lines starting and going up to the edge: they alternate with the eri silk vertical lines and they do not start all from the same height, but all go up to the edge, where there is a double line going all around. All done with chain stitch and grass stitch.

On the other side of the bowl, the one that is lighter blue at the center, darker blue and then grey towards the edges, I am couching a red cotton yarn with a blue/indigo Anchor stranded thread: the effect is totally mesmerising and a bit unexpected for me. It takes ages, but I am keeping up because I like the result, although it will probably not pair well with the other side of the bowl: they are surely very different!

I have also felted another very circular artwork, but I will talk about it in my next post.

Well, not too bad considering the fact that I did not have much time during this last part of 2024!

I keep having life interfering with my felting time, so I have not had much time to felt bigger things lately, but it is that time of the year when we need to start planning for Christmas gifts!

I would like to look with you at a wet felting project that I made almost exactly one year ago, when I had a bit more time to create bigger things that could serve as nice gifts: a big carry-all bag that I gave to my friend. She has kids and kids have activities to go to, where they need to have plenty of stuff, from towels and swimming suits to snacks and water bottles. Felt seems to me very good for that kind of carry-alls, because it is germ and water resistant,and generally life resistant as well.

First of all, I was thinking about size: I was going to use some big bamboo handles that I had bought at a good price, so its size and shape should be the right one for the handles.

I cut a resist from bubblewrap and put my big handles against it to gauge the right size and shape, always taking shrinkage of the final felt into account.

I wanted to have an internal lining to the bag, thinking about future rough use, as I was planning to make the felt with my usual Merino wool, which is not the toughest of the wool types (but I just love it, and I will use it as much as possible).

I took out my stash of scarves for felting and found one that I liked for lining the bag and that I thought will felt in very well from past experience, as I hate hand sewing and I wanted to be able to nuno felt the fabric into the wool to give it more structure: I think that it must be a wool based fabric, although I do not know for sure, as it did not have a label when I bought it at a charity shop. It is a cream scarf with teal edges with tassels.

I planned to have two internal pockets, one on each side of the bag, so I laid out my pockets before laying out the lining.

Then I put the first lining fabric shape and started on the serious job of laying my first layer of Merino wool.

I covered the laid out wool with a piece of bubble wrap, so that a pocket would remain…well, that was the plan, but I did not think it properly and the bubble wrap was a tad too big, and the pocket did not come out as I wanted properly attached to the side of the bag, so I had to work on it a lot more than I was expecting!

Anyway, then I put my lining on the pocket and started laying out the whole side of my bag.

Now, to the actual laying out of my bag!

I wanted a neutral background, as I was planning to use plenty of colours as decoration, so I opted for a lighter grey Merino wool, of which I had plenty just at that moment, due to a lucky mistake in ordering (I had ordered it twice! Never mind, I used it a lot afterwards.).

Fine, back to work: I laid out my layers starting from the edges of the fabric shape and then going towards the center. I chose a plain horizontal-vertical pattern for my layers, nothing fancy, and I laid out my wool a bit thicker than I would in finer objects such as scarves.

Having laid my wool pretty thickly, I decided to stop there, and to go on and wet, soap and lightly rub the first side, to avoid having hidden dry areas once the second side was on.

Then, I turned over the first side and started working on the second side.

Right, where were we? the second pocket of course! Now, I paused for a while, trying to figure out that one as well: I always have some head scratching when trying to work backwards, I always feel pretty dense, because it takes me ages to work it out, and I often make mistakes.

Then, of course, I had to put the second small rectangular piece of bubble wrap for the second pocket to open…well, guess what (picture embarassed face palm here) I forgot! So, basically, afterwards I was looking for a non-existing bubble wrap inside the felt, then glanced at the chair and had a laughing moment of recognition (oh, oh, what are you doing there?? you should be in my bag! I have been looking for you for ten minutes, torturing and puncturing the side!). I mean, there must be something with me and pockets, I do not know, I always have to pay extra attention to their crafting, and still most of the time something goes wrong and I have to rework them at the end.

Well, I blithely went on with the cream lining fabric, folding on it all the edges from the other side, so as not to lay my edges too thick with layers from the second side.

I added my layers of Merino wool mirroring the other side and careful not to put too much wool on the edges.

And then, the best part of all, decoration time!

I had already decided that I wanted colours colours colours. OK, but which ones? I took out the brightest from my stash, and tried a few combinations until I found the ones that I liked best for this project. I decided to lay out wisps of the various colours in a modern horizontal pattern on this second side. I reasoned that my big carry-all bag would have needed a bigger bottom, so I decided to leave the bottom third of the bag without decoration. I left my bright lines go over the left and right edges only a bit, because I was planning to change decoration pattern on the other side (because, why not?)

I wet and soaped and lightly rubbed this second side and turned over the bag to decorate the other side as well.

Wetting, soaping and rubbing accomplished on this side as well, I started quite a while of rolling on all directions.

When I stopped after a bit to open up the pockets after I felt the wool had started to shrink, I found out that one of the pockets was not properly attached and the other..was totally attached! Argh, pockets!

Never mind, I got into recovery mode, and managed to salvage the badly attached one, by first needle-felting its edges, then also stitching them with hidden stitches.

I finished the rolling and felting, trying to go on fulling a little bit longer than my usual, because I wanted a good proper felt.

Lastly, I stitched the bamboo handles on it, using the two flaps that I had designed into the resist for that purpose.

I put a small bag of Christmas needle felted baubles in it and gifted it to my friend, who was very surprised by finding it on her door one evening right before Christmas holidays.

I enjoyed the making of this bag, and especially the gifting of it, and I hope that my friend made good use of it.

I hope that it will inspire your coming Christmas season gifts as well.

This time I would like you to follow me on a journey of discovery of the inspiring abstract beauty of..rocks! Well, I know, rocks are often deemed quite boring in a dumb-as-dirt kind of way, but, please, bear with me, and I hope that you will come to see their weird artistic side by the end of my post.

I have a geologist dad who has always been commenting on different rocks and sedimentary formations that we could observe during our yearly holidays to the mountains. We were very lucky to have a great variety of different types to observe, apparently, as we used to live not that far from both Italian Alps and Dolomites ranges, so plenty to pick from.

In particular, Dolomia, the unique type of limestone that mainly forms the Dolomites mountains, is a beautiful white or pale grey rock that can hold fossils and lends itself to the most lovely effects at sunset: the mountains become all soft pink in a very romantic fashion. Dolomites have rightly been included in the World Heritage List for their unique beauty in 2009 (link here).

Not that I have been that interested in rocks from a geological point of view, I must admit: just picking a few shiny or interesting pebbles here and there, like all kids do, that kind of stuff. My dad always tried to smuggle some pound-weighting rare pitchblende, fossil or whatever into his backpack by the end of the holiday, while mum used to complain about more rocks in the house: it was that kind of family thing.

Since I took on a new interest in art, though, I have been quite fascinated by the look of some of the rocks that I keep finding around now when I go on holiday with my own family: my husband and kids are complaining about my lugging around pebbles and rocks galore, when they are not picking up some for themselves (and who is the one hoarding rocks now, eh?). We have become that sort of family, eh eh. I pick my pieces wherever we go, but especially on the beach (usually in Norfolk, UK, where there is a huge variety of pieces and fossils, too) or in the mountains (usually in Cadore, Italy).

Because of space issues in our small flat, I now try to stick to photographing the interesting pieces, unless they are so small to be viable for transportation. And sometimes I like a composition of a few rocks together: that would be hard to take home!

I also sometimes really love brick or rock walls that I find around, and stop there observing them and thinking about how to reproduce the same combination of visually pleasing colours and shapes in felt: I know that there are many felters and fibre artists who study walls and bricks to add realism to their landscapes, so I am not the only one stopping in front of ordinary walls for half an hour and photographing them!

So, let’s have a look at some of the amazing hard stuff that I saw, and I hope that you will be inspired too!

Rocks that may inspire abstract composition:

Rocks with a sculptural element:

A collection of beach abstracts:

I really hope that some of my rocks and pebbles have talked to you and will drive a rock-inspired abstract artwork movement! Lol.

 

 

Or maybe I should say “Felting something inspired by books“: that is what I would like to talk about with you today, although the other one also gives me a few ideas, now that I think about it. Maybe we could launch a year-long challenge on “Felting a book” or, better probably, “Textiling a book” to keep it completely inclusive, but then I guess Ruth would be already done with her Book of Edgar (here is a link where you can see it at the end of the post) and Ann with her Year Journal of felted pages (this is her last page).

Oh well, let’s go back to books as inspiration.

I usually do not get inspired by books for visual art, because, I don’t know, they often seem two different realms, unless the book is actually about embroidery or textile art or art in general. But I tend to read a lot. I mean a LOT, that is my main hobby and I manage to squeeze reading into most chores as well, to make the most of boring time such as washing up or ironing. I am a Humanities type through and through, and that is where I come from in terms of education as well. This whole part is to explain why I got to felt a whole series of textile works on a book that I was reading, as my experience of the book (or rather five books all linked together!) in question was so immersive, reading it by day and night for weeks.

First of all, the novels are massive and are called The Gormenghast series, by Mervyn Peake, or simply Gormenghast for its friends.  (Here is the link to the wikipedia link.) It is actually a long fantasy trilogy, to which a fourth book was added after the author’s death, and it is such a sprawling, flooding and never-ending series that one would not know where to start to talk about its plot and characters.

Great part of it is set in the place giving the name to the series, which is Castle Gormenghast, a maze of a place, more resembling an endless palace-city than a castle as its name states.

The series is a bewildering succession of unlovable characters, full of foibles and quirks, and quite often motivated by less-than-honourable drives, acting in loads of ways up to and including murder in some bizarre fashion (“eaten by owls” rather comes to mind as one of the most bizarre). I could not find a single character that was appealing to me, to tell you the truth, I just could not like any of them. I get it that it has its own fans and quite a following, but I am not one of them.

So, why did I start felting works on its characters or scenes from it? did I just waste my time reading it?

Well, it is maybe the first time that I find a novel that really I can’t stand at all, but that impresses such vivid imagines in my mind’s eye: Gormenghast is all about flamboyant and often weird visual descriptions, its author himself was a visual artist and illustrator, his work was all imbued with visual imagery that just pops out of the page in his writing. I could just see all of those in my head, and could not help feeling that I had to create something to get rid of them. Have you ever had the same feeling over an artwork, that it just needs to be done so you can go on to something else?

So, I got to work as soon as possible and with a vengeance (so to speak), trying to complete the first one, and then all the others that came after it while I was going on reading the rest of the series to the end. Don’t ask why I kept reading it, although I did not like it..I guess in part it was also because I kept thinking “Oh, this would make a good felt artwork, actually! And this one..I wonder how to create this visually in felt..”

My first one was about Barquentine, a priest-like figure, stomping around with his red official rags, wooden leg and a very bad character, imposing the never-ending rituals and rules of Gormenghast to everybody. He ends up dead, in a bad way, as a lot of the characters. Oh well, I did not like him anyway.

I started by preparing a grey base layer, lightly prefelted, on which to work, and a prefelt of reds for Barquentine’s dress and greys for the Castle background.

I wanted the Castle to be a very present background in my work, as Barquentine is all about the Castle, its eternal presence defying time and rot, its inevitability in the lives of the Castle’s ruling family, the Groans, and their subjects. So, I decided to set a background that I imagined as the grim stony Castle’s Banquet Hall or any of the grim stony corridors around the Castle, of which there were kilometers I suppose, or some such.

I used a mix of merino dyed and undyed wool fiber and Corriedale, and rectangular or square shapes cut from the lightly prefelted merino wool made previously and other prefelt from my stash, all in tones of grey with a few accents of reddish-brown and pewter. Perspective did not interest me in this, as those bigger-than-life characters tend to pop out of the background anyway, if I am making sense. The central strip of reddish-brown prefelt could be the Banquet Hall table seen at a distance, maybe, or maybe something else, you choose.

Finally, I assembled Barquentine’s body shape and rags dress on the background. I choose to make Barquentine’s body in black, not because the character is actually described as so, but because he dies in a fire and I felt that a symbolic character such as him should have an abstract streamlined body. I wanted to have his claw-like hand kind of pointing at something wrong or other, and I wanted him to go away from us towards the Castle in his wobbling gait, underlining his wooden leg with a few strands of shiny red eri silk fiber (his wooden leg is very central to him).

I decided to partly shape and partly shred the red prefelt, adding touches of red and grey wool as needed for the rags, and I scattered some brilliant red napps on it as well.

Some of the napps did not felt in properly in the end, but enough stayed put that it was fine by me.

 

I quite liked how this came out after wetting, soaping, rubbing and lightly rolling:

 

 

I eventually went on to wet felt six other Gormenghast themed abstract artworks, all of them quite small: they are 7 in all, of which 5 are on characters and 2 are about meaningful scenes of the series.

I could not wait to finish them and go on to other things, although at the same time I would not want to not have made them at all, I felt that I needed to create them and I hope that anyone who has read Gormenghast will understand and see something true in them.

Has it ever happened to you something similar, not liking a book but being driven to creating artwork on it? Please, share your experiences in the comments, and thanks for reading!

Oh, the rabbit hole of looking through a social media or selling platform for just that thing that will add to your stash!

If it were for only my force of will, I would never stop scrolling, but, luckily, I have commitments and a family that will grumble if I forget to provide dinner by a certain time! That usually saves me and my wallet, as I will stop my going online and not literally buy everything! Because, I do not know about you, but I simply love the idea of possibilities that all of the stuff online would give me if I just could have all of it in my own place!

All smoke and mirrors, I know, and I will never have the million years of time needed to try everything anyway, but..well, you know, hope is the great addiction, isn’t it.

So, some time ago, in the spirit of almost-scientific research (that is a clever name for it, you can get away with a lot in the name of scientific research in my house) and dazzled by my own confused fantasies, I bought a full baby Alpaca fleece from a local farm, after seeing them on a selling platform, looking up their website and getting hooked on baby Alpacas photos (ooooohhhh, they are just sooooo cute!). You will appreciate that I had started by looking for black pencil roving and, possibly, nepps: like, 50 grams of stuff or thereabout, easy to stash in one of the drawers. I obviously did not buy any roving or nepps whatsoever.

The fact is, they let you choose among different colours, and Alpaca has so many of them that you can enjoy looking at baby Alpacas for quite a long time. I saw this rust coloured dream of a fleece and just had the most amazing daydream about giving my kids the best chair/bed spreads ever, warm, feather-weight, cozy and exactly the perfect colour to match the rest of their bedroom furniture enhancing it. (Plus, reminding us of baby Alpacas!) Then I started daydreaming about making more felt Alpaca rugs for all my friends in time, and it quickly went downhill from that.

Well, the fleece is very cheap compared to buying a woven Alpaca spread, I know because I checked, Alpaca is the new cachemire they say, so I thought that I could afford to see if I could make something acceptable out of it, although I had not experience with Alpaca or with full fleeces (albeit baby fleeces) or with felting a chair rug/bedspread. Well, I mentioned that I am a hopeful daydreamer!

The farm lady of  Cold Comfort Alpaca was super kind, she answered immediately when I asked about the fleece being unwashed but not terribly soiled and with the worse dirtied parts taken off. She also gave me reassurances that the fleece was suitable for wet felting. That was about the only sensible check that I made before plunging head on into it, so I would like to point out that she was totally honest and the fleece is exactly as described. Lucky for me, as it does not smell at all, it is totally doable to keep it inside the house: I can swear it on whatever you like, because it has been living in a cardboard box in my living room ever since, so I know for sure.

(By the way, I gathered that the beginning of May is a very good time for looking for fresh baby Alpaca fleeces, if you are interested. I found them on the Cold Comfort Alpaca Store on Etsy. )

When the box arrived, I was just so excited and nervous that I had to open it straight away! And..yes! it was all I was hoping for in terms of colour and softness: my kids just wanted to dive into it and bury themselves in the rusty curly locks, and my hands just wanted to keep on gently stroking the fleece. I was totally addicted to it from the start, it was impossible not to, especially thinking about the baby Alpacas in the photos..

Well, knowing my limited time supply, I just knew that I needed to complete my wet felting in a weekend, or two maximum, or I would never get about finishing it: I will just say, yep, I was spot on on that.

I had not a very clear idea of how to accomplish my goal: it was my first rug, and of course my daydreaming severely impaired my ability to think things through properly. I now know that I should have prepared a base of mixed wool and Alpaca fibers, on which to felt the alpaca locks, whereas what I did was trying to wet felt the base of the locks together: I guess that this is a typical rookie mistake.

I spread about half the locks and fleece bits on my table, trying to keep the shading of colour naturally changing and interesting. That took me some time, and when I wetted and soaped it and started the felting process it was already a bit late, what with the kids coming to have a look every five minutes and giving their own contribution to it (ahem).

I got to rubbing the fleece lightly,  afraid that I would felt in the locks too much. Then I started the rubbing. Unfortunately, my time was not enough for a long rubbing that day, and also I was afraid to felt in the locks, I wanted time to stop every now and then and check on them, but I did not have it then.

So, I thought better to stop there, wash it and put it away for further work later on: that was not such a brilliant idea, as the fleece seemed to hold together at first under the tap, but then started to show holes everywhere! Argh!

In hindsight, I should have washed it rolled up, and very delicately, as some of our expert felters suggested when I asked for help later (of course, I asked later, because that is me). Or, better, not wash it at all until properly felted, but I was not sure how soon I could go back to work on it afterwards.

Anyway, I put it to dry flat on a rack, with the whole family stealing caresses to it as soon as it was dry enough, even though I kept telling everyone (and myself) not to do it because it was already almost cobweb felt, but no way, it was sooo soft, irresistible. The kids started taking it off the rack to bury themselves into it now and again for a cuddle and I did not have heart to tell them off much: it was right addictive. Of course the holes kept growing until I had to store it away before it was more holes than fleece!

In the meantime, I understood that I needed to re-work the rug with a backing, mixing Alpaca fiber and Merino wool. So, I selected the shortest and the dirtiest bits of fleece and started hand carding them with pet brushes, to get the Alpaca fiber.

I kept on with the carding for a while, but it was slow and messy: consider that I do not have a place outside where I can make a bit of a mess, I had to work in my living room. So, I started carding it only on the evenings before my house cleaning days: it is quite incredible the amount of vegetable matter and mud (let’s leave it at that) that were coming out of just a few locks that did not seem that full of VM in the first place! I was very quickly bored to death and annoyed by the mess, with only a small light plastic bag of carded fiber to show for it!

I admit that I was pushed to cheating, at this point, and purchased a small bag of brown Alpaca fiber on WoW (it was at discounted price!), and then felt as a traitor to our baby Ruben and dubious if it would be too dark a brown for blending well with the rest. Anyway, in the end it would be just too expensive to go on buying more carded Alpaca instead of making my own with the fleece that I already have in abundance.

And here we are, as I left my project there and did not go on carding or felting Alpaca since.

That’s a real pity, as I am still dreaming about the baby Alpaca rugs that are there, waiting for me to make them real. The box with the fleece is here in my living room, looking at me reproachfully, and my husband sometimes hints at “disposing of it or at least doing something with it”, so I guess I will have to finish my UFOs sometime soon.

I learned so much already that I think that I will be able to make a better job of it as well this time around 🙂 but if you have other tips to give me, please share them in the comments, as I am surely going back to my almost-addictively-soft baby Alpaca fleece!

I have recently been to see the exhibition ‘Unravel. The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art’ at the Barbican Centre in London, UK. Here is the link to the relevant page of the Barbican website.

It runs until the 26th May 2024, so people living close can still catch it if they like. The theme is clearly about political art, or art that tackles difficult themes.

I have to say that it got mixed feelings from me, I liked some of the pieces and some not as much, but anyway I feel that it is good to see textiles under the spotlight again, and hopefully this will help with recognition of textile artists everywhere. It was crowded, so there seems to be a lot of interest from the art cliques.

The exhibition was boasting pieces from 50 different international artists, the great majority of them well established and renowned, some of them already passed away. I actually went to the exhibition hoping to see mainly contemporary scene artists, and I understood later that I had seen pieces from some of the people who brought textiles into the Fine Arts spectrum in the Fifties and Sixties!

Most of the artists were also eclectic artist that had started as, variously, traditional painters or ceramists or sculptors.

Some of the pieces were a bit more conceptual than I would have liked, resulting in not particularly interesting techniques but a lot of effort in reading the accompanying texts, and it got a bit too much by the end of the afternoon.

An example of big names’ artworks were Leonore Tawney’s hanging woven sculptures, that broke with the idea of tapestries as the only possible woven outcome: she was a pioneer of the fibre art movement in the United States in the Fifties. Her long life (she lived to 100!) was dedicated to art and her parabola followed somewhat that of the fibre art movement , with a period of recognition in the Fifties followed by fewer exhibitions and recognition after the Seventies. After her earlier experiments with the loom in the Fifites, she gradually abandoned the loom for freer hanging shapes, and finally a nascent type of installation art, driven by a sense of spirituality that was in her 1950s works as well.

Another renowned American fibre artist whose piece I saw at the exhibition is Sheila Hicks, who was present with one of her installations of her ‘bundles’: groups of objects made of colourful yarn and fibres tightly wrapped to resemble sticks and pebbles. She is one of the innovators of the Sixties and Seventies fibre movement, and went on creating different installation art and sculpture pieces. The idea of traditional practices and indigenous rituals plays a part in her installations.

I felt that the representation of artists was a bit scarce on the European and Australian side, whereas the other continents seemed well represented.

There was a British contribution with a quilt piece by Tracey Emin, completely leaning towards the spoken word. It got a lot of interest from the artsy crowd. She upcycled different fabrics to create it, among those a Union Jack and felt scraps from old blankets, and hand appliqued and hand stitched them to shape provocative sentences.

A contribution from Poland was a beautiful quilt by Malgorzata Mirga-Tas depicting life as a Roma, and made by repurposing everyday fabrics. The scene of life in a Roma settlement is very lively and immediately relatable.

I was particularly pleased to see some relatively new face from Africa, such as Billie Zangewa from Malawi and later South Africa, that I did not know and now I looked up on internet and in my reference book on textile artists.

She calls her pieces ‘hand-embroidered silk collage’ and I would say that that name suits them best than the name that I have seen given them, ‘silk tapestries’ . She uses scraps of silk fabrics with strong visual impact.

There was a room all about artworks by South African Igshaan Adams: some works hanging in the middle of the room, almost inviting the viewer to go into their clouds (totally forbidden! all the toddlers were tempted, but the museum attendants were very strict), some from the walls, and a big painting-like piece occupying the whole of one wall by itself. All encrusted with beads and shells and small semi-precious stones, with twisted fabric scraps.

Instead, Tau Lewis is a Canadian artist who talks about her roots as descendant of the African diaspora: she often represents lost Middle Passage victims as fantastical sea creatures in her huge wall hangings.

There was a good representation of Asian artists, such as Cian Dayrit from Philippines with two big embroidered maps in the section about Borderlands, showing places where colonialism is still a very current issue.

Zamthingla Ruivah’s woven piece is actually not one to be shown in a museum as wall hanging but a piece that is meant to be worn everyday as a symbol of protest for the injustice and violence suffered by a young girl in India: thousands of people in the young girl’s local area now weave and wear cloth in that pattern that has become a silent rallying cry for justice. A kind of everyday power of art when it comes in contact with textiles.

Another big name of the fibre art scene was Indian artist Mrinalini Mukherjee, who was present with three pieces of her knotted sculptures resembling human figures. I quite liked her pieces, as I am quite fond of macrame artists, and her pieces seemed to me viscerally meaningful, like ancient goddess’ statues talking to me from the past.

There were no felt pieces at all, a bit disappointing that, as I know quite a few felters that could have been spot on for the theme.

There was a big installation piece that was made with unspoon wool, described in the exhibition leaflet as ‘the product of making yarn but stopping after the carding process.’ It seemed like barely prefelted wool to me, but a bit more consistent than carded wool. There was sound as well, but it was hard to appreciate it in the crowded room where also one other installation piece with sound had the same issue. The artist, South American Cecilia Vicuna, makes pieces that are grounded in Chilean traditions.

At the end of the exhibition there were some scraps of things that were made using materials and techniques seen in the art pieces, so we could touch and feel the materials: it was a very nice, family friendly touch (pun intended).

I hope to have given you a taste of what was on show.

After the exhibition, I also got a book on textile artists and politics, although not the exhibition book: ‘Women’s Work. From feminine arts to feminist art.’ by Ferren Gipson. It’s a collection of biographies of a couple of pages each, with some photos of artworks for each artist: I think that it can be a good reference book to know who is who in the old guard of textile art, though there are some more contemporary faces. It’s a bit scarce on the techniques side, but anyway pretty interesting from a historical point of view.

 

My first Christmas card exchange, the 2023 edition, for the Felting and Fiber Studio group has been quite a challenge, not only because I was paired with the exceptionally talented and much experienced Karen Lane (no pressure, eh), but also because I had NO IDEA at all of what to make! I had never ever given a thought at making a Christmas card myself, and I had never set myself a size so small for wetfelting.

I decided to start thinking and experimenting as soon as possible, and am I glad that I did! because my first try at it went in a completely different direction than intended! It is this first card that I am talking about in my blogpost today, and I am sharing its making that I kept secret up until now (apart from a hasty consultation with a friend).

I started by thinking about Christmas and what it meant to me. My line of reasoning was pretty muddled, but I grasped at something that might have been significant: family and family relationships, that is an aspect of Christmas to me. As no more brilliant ideas were forthcoming, I went for it and thought in terms of family ties, blood ties, and so on. Unfortunately, this is not a particularly jolly thought for me, but I decided to see where it could lead me.

I was thinking about embroidery on felt, as I had seen lovely embroidered portraits lately, and I just had an itch to scratch about embroidering portraits on felt myself, it seemed just colliding with the idea of family: family portraits, why not!

I hit on blood ties among women as the thing that I wanted to talk about, relationship among generations on the maternal line, difficult and complex and rewarding and aggravating…

I have this slight face blindness, so I decided to draw my design from manipulated photos of my family. I chose three photos that I liked, with smiles that I liked, representing also good times. Then I manipulated them to black and white and a bit of blurring: I wanted to be able to see the main lines of the shapes.

I reduced their size and put the three images on the same page to print them on paper. Then I put a strong light underneath the print and traced the lines that I deemed more important onto a different paper. I used this last drawing to trace the lines on plasticky water-soluble fabric to use on the felt base.

My next step was to prepare the felt on which to embroider, of course.

I used two layers of dark grey merino, and then went on to add a layer of different reds mixed with some grey merino for the top. Red for blood, as in “blood ties” and “visceral relationships” , but also red as a Christmas colour: I was still thinking about the Christmas card exchange here.

I put some scraps of bubble wrap in between the dark grey base layers and the red layer, so that I could cut holes on the base: these represent the complexity of the family relationships.

After finishing and drying the felt background I cut the holes that I had decided on, and worked a little bit on their edges. I did not want to work too much on them, to let them have a bit of a raw appearance.

After drying the felt again, I was ready for the hand stitching step.

The water soluble fabric is not the easiest background on which to hand stitch, I found out. It was only my second time using it, and my first of using it extensively and for precision work: well, I can’t say as I liked it, as it tends to tear easily close to fiddly bits, and its shiny surface makes it harder to see and follow the design. Anyway, I persevered and I was really happy with the results, as I could see that it was all coming out as I wanted with the hand stitching step.

Then it was the time to dissolve the water soluble fabric and see if it all worked well! The fabric dissolved very easily, and leaving no residues on the felt.

At this point, I had planned to have links coming out and going into the holes, although I had not decided on precisely what kind of ties or what colour.

At the beginning, I was thinking about a mix of different types of felt cords and threads, and about different colours to lighten the mood of the piece, but in the end I really did not like the effect of many colours on it.

I left it to simmer for a few days, then decided on crocheting links and ties with black cotton yarn.

The crochet needed holes punctured into the felt to hook the thread into it, and I made those with difficulty because they kept closing up.

The interesting thing about crocheting the cords was that I was able to crochet free-form shapes and “objects” into them, and I could link the cords among themselves, to reflect complexity.

I wasn’t perfectly happy with the outcome, though: I decided to add some grey shadowing around the figures with needlefelting.

After seeing the finished piece, I could not in all honesty call it particularly jolly or Christmassy. It was also highly personal and not very suitable to make a card to someone outside my own family: once the creative rush of finishing the piece was ended, I realised I could not use it for the Christmas exchange!

I had basically used the excuse of the exchange to go on a creative rampage in the direction that I already secretly wanted to pursue, ahem. Well, what was done was done, and, lucky me, I had started very early so had still plenty of time to make something else!

The family related piece gained a grey backing and was sent as a secret little present to my mum, who was moved by it.

I got back to square one, put on my thinking cap, and decided on a much lighter mood for my real Christmas exchange card: a friendship present of flowers and abstract landscape that I hope Karen liked.

And worry not, I managed to cram as many techniques as I could in it, from fabric collage to mark making on fabric to nuno felting and embroidery. So, in the end, I had days and days of wonderful experiments just from the one challenge :)) I will definitely go for it next Christmas as well!

Sorry for the rushed photos of my real card, as I was eager to send it before getting caught in the Festive Weeks of Madness at my kids’ school.

A bit ago I found myself with the usual thousands of small left-overs from cutting up pre-felt or fabric and yarn for different projects: pieces too small for beautiful regular patterns of shapes, but I really could not see myself throwing them away…some may say that I am a bit of a hoarder, I really call myself a forward-looking creative (it applies also to scraps of paper from paper projects, and bits and bobs from many other creative ideas and ventures)!

I am certain all creative types here will sympathise, at least all hoarding ones!

Anyway, what to do with all that treasure of tiny pieces? Wet-felting is downright wonderful for using all of that to magnificent effect, even the shapeless or tiniest bits: they all become embellishments for your project. Just find yourself a nice wet-felting idea that fits with what you need, and then make it interesting and colourful with all those scraps!

My project to use up some of my stash of scraps is an easy but very effective bowl, made with a very simple circular resist: any bowl or vessel looks stunning with bold solid colours and with the addition of scraps of pre-felt, fabric and yarns, I find.

Here are the steps to make a colourful wet-felted bowl, with the aid of a sander if you have one, although it is not necessary to use one, especially if your left-overs are all wool based and so very easy to felt in.

Bowls are very forgiving of mistakes in layout when you make seven or more layers, so they make for a fun layout practice. I used merino wool, as it is the wool that I have mainly, and also one of the types of wool that I like best working with: it felts very easily, and is just so soft to handle!

For resist, I just cut a circular shape from a bubble-wrapping sheet, easy peasy.

For an easy and fuss-free explanation on how to wet-felt with resists, I recommend Rosiepink’s tutorial “How to Make 3D Felt Vessels“.

I called it Tuttifrutti Bowl, as it seems so yummy! Its size is good for holding fruit or just making for a decorative show-stopper.

So, have a go at using all your stash of small bits on a colourful and fun wet-felting project!

 

 

 

@kiki.textile.art

http://www.kikistextileart.com

 

Hello, everybody!

I have been very busy during my recent summer holidays, unfortunately not busy felting, so I am a bit behind with my felting experiments and learning right now!

That is because I lately have used my holidays to challenge myself with something different, taking with me only a few of my stash wool and supplies, and focusing on a single idea that I wanted to try and learn better. The fact that I can’t bring with me my usual tools and implements is a challenge in itself: I have to use whatever I can scavenge around, and I feel that it teaches me to be less reliant on my routine and my favourite tools. I do not truly need any of those, I found out that you truly do not need any fancy stuff to felt, it just takes a bit more effort sometimes, and understanding companions that will put up with you grabbing the rolling pin and all the bin plastic bags from the kitchen.

On my first year, I tried to wet felt vessels and pouches.

I had never gone that thick before, and I tried a sander for the occasion: that was a first as well! I managed to felt two vessels, one with a basic truncated-cone resist, and one with a strange resist (a truncated cone with add-ons at the corners, do not ask me why, spur of the moment thing). I understood that you need more than 4 layers: it was a concept that I did not readily welcome, as I realised that I did not have enough wool with me for more trials!

I used my newfound awareness about thickness to wet felt an almost A-4 sized pouch: it was my first one ever, and I was terrified that I would not be able to find the resist of the pocket in the end if I included one, so I just went for the basic shape! I had never done a rectangular shape before, so that was a first also: learning how to make straightish lines and corners! I also understood that it takes a lot of elbow grease and time for a wet felted vessel or bowl, and you need to add quite a bit to your resist size if you work with merino wool and you want your vessel to stand upright in the end!

 

 

On my second year, I was back on holiday after Covid had forced me to skip a couple of years of travelling: I had to isolate myself for a while before being able to move around, so I practiced patience! That is, laying fine layers of wool: I mean, extra fine layers!

That helped me enormously with layout control, passing time very pleasantly, and also solved my problem of what to gift to my various friends and sisters-in-law: I made a lot of extra-lightweight scarves in merino wool with accents of silk fibers. Everybody was so happy, it was a win-win. Afterwards, I was able to make more uniform felt, and tackle other challenges such as wet felting kids mittens.

I also enrolled in a yearly subscription to Lena Archbold’s online classes (here her website): I was eager to learn a lot from her, although I find her voice and manners the uber-treatment for insomnia! I managed to complete three or four of her online classes and to actually try making 2-3 of her suggested coursework designs, mainly during or right after my holidays (of course), but then did not have time for more. Pity, because I learned quite a lot from her (she also helped me sleep most evenings, that is not to be sneered at). Only a couple of the suggested designs really worked for me, the others that I tried I did not like the results, and I had major failures on a couple of occasions! That was totally my fault, because I tend to , ahem, be creative with instructions sometime. Also because I do not really like her style of fashion, so I often change materials and combinations with supplies I own and like.  Anyway, when I had the patience to try again and understand from my previous mistakes, I got very good results. More importantly, I learned some good techniques and tips from her classes.

 

On my third year, I managed to scrounge some me time to enroll on Felting&Fiber Studio member Ruth Lane’s great online class on Embellishing Felt with Surface Design Techniques: fabulous!

I managed only the module on Printing, Stenciling, and Playing with Thickened Dye on Felt, as my time is always limited, but it was very inspiring and I had a real learning summer, full of ideas and experiments. It was challenging, because I had to learn a whole new set of creative tools, and I am by no means finished with the learning about it. Still, summer is short and I need to pace my creative work during the year, unfortunately: I am constantly adding to my printing stash the odd interesting surface, waiting for the time to play with dyes in future! I would love to take other Felting and Fiber Studio classes in future: during holidays, of course!

I also had some ideas on surface embellishment through stitching and embroidering to try: I wet felted a couple of small key trays in blue to try my hand with.

And, lastly, this summer I have been wanting to experiment with differential shrinkage and manipulation.

I only brought white merino wool with me, with a bit of other colours and silk, a small bag of orange locks, and I came back with a good half of what I brought untouched: I had very little time and I managed to complete only one vessel. I really like it though, and I think that I would like to follow through with my other ideas to try. I found the layers felt easier than what I remembered from my first tries without sander (I lately always use my sander when felting thicker felt, but I did not use it in this occasion): maybe I am just becoming better at wet felting or I get less impatient with my rubbing and rolling and fulling. I did not find the manipulation part of the project as exhausting and boring as I was afraid: possibly because I had to complete the job in two times, a week apart, and it felted faster and better because of that?

It was a bit of a complicated summer for me, and it does not signify that I could not felt as much as I originally planned: I am sure that next year will be different!

I find that summer is a very good time for me to try one or two different things and learn, as bringing only a few supplies forces me to focus only on one aspect of my felt, and I very determinedly embrace the idea of learning something each summer. I tried taking online classes during the year, but it gets too much for me with my family commitments and job commitments, it just does not work well for me.

Do you set aside a time specifically for learning or experimenting too?