Last weekend I had my last scheduled nuno felt class until the fall. I had 6 enthusiastic women attending and we had a great day.
Earlier in the week I died some more scarf blanks so everyone would have lots to choose from. I use the scrunch dye technique with MX/fiber reactive dye, from Paula Burch’s site. http://www.pburch.net/dyeing/lowwaterimmersion.shtml
Everyone had fun doing their layout and being creative with fibers. It always amazes me how different they all are.
Of course, there was always all the usual rubbing.
and rolling
6 happy nuno felting ladies.
And their scarves
All in all, a wonderful day with wool and silk. Not quite as much fun as playing myself but still fun. I really like teaching and seeing the amazement on people’s faces when it really works.
I have been thinking I should do more of my stitched felt book. I have August ready to go but I just don’t feel like it. I don’t know why but I am sure you have all felt the same way about a project. So what to do, I am itchy to make something and I need something to chat about. So I went rummaging through my little bits and came up with this, It is approx 4×5 inches/10x13cm. The colours are a bit off the yellow is a bit more green and the blue is a bit more turquoise.
I decided the one on the right looked like some ground then some water and mountains in the background. If you squint I am sure you will see it too.
I started with the mountain adding some shades of grey to define the mountains I didn’t see the funny curved bit on the right until I took a picture, so, had to smooth that out too. I am not sure why our eyes lie to us.
Then I defined the far shore
Onto the trees
And that’s as far as I am. Hopefully, I will have more done by the next post, but no promises.
Last time I was telling you about a spindle case I was working on. It is here if you missed it making-a-spindle-case-mark-1
last time I had added all the wool so now it was time for some decorations. I grabbed some of my handspun and covered the case in a random pattern all over, remembering to go under the flap and to leave some sticking out to wrap around so it is continuous on the other side.
The other side. I didn’t do the ends because they would be folded. I did cover all the yarn with a very very thin layer of the background wool as I wanted it to adhere without too much effort.
I gave everything a good rubbing until it was starting to shrink and the yarn was well stuck and then rolled it. I got it back down to 12 inches in length but the other way didn’t want to shrink up.
I rolled it more and harder in that direction. I heated it and rolled it in my hand but it didn’t want to go where I wanted it. I thought I would try rinsing it, and throwing it in the sink and shocking it with hot and cold water. Fortunately, that did it. The next step would have been putting it aside for a few days and trying again. I do know from experience that letting something rest often works. But I didn’t want to wait.
Here it is finished. It looks ok. I am not sure I like the accordion folds on the ends. I have never been good at them, they never look sharp like I see others. The next one may get different ends. Overall the look is good but it is not stiff enough.
Here it is with 3 different size spindles in it. I am using the clip to keep it open. the small one is very loose in it. The medium one is a fairly good fit and the large one will not fit at all.
spindle case with small spindlespindle case with medium spindleMedium spindle outside case for size.Large spindle not fitting spindle case
Different wool might be better. I used Merino because it is what I have the most of. Coriedale might be enough but maybe Finnish or Bergshef. I also think it needs to be thicker as well as stiffer. It doesn’t feel like it would be very protective against bumps and knocks. What are your thoughts on improvements?
There is no way I can get there but I thought a felt spindle case would be a nice thing to have. I have a whole afternoon when I am not supposed to be doing something, I will make myself one.
12 inch finished length should be good but how big around? I didn’t have a handy spindle but I did have a couple of whorls waiting for shafts. I had to use string to measure it as I can never find a sewing tape when I need one.
I am going to use Merino so I will expect a 30% shrinkage. I added 50% to the measurements, then I added some points on the end so I could fold them in. I thought that looked nice and if needed you push them out and stuff extra wool into them.
I added an extra piece of underlay resist for the flap to close it. I was going to add lone felt ropes to close it but although I like the way that looks I find them a nuisance to use. 2 or 3 button closures should work.
Next was adding some wool. I didn’t measure out how much. I just added sool until it felt right. I will have to weigh it when it’s dry here is the flap side laid out.
I will get you the rest next time. I ran out of time to tell you more. I was selling for Jan and myself at the Chestervill spin-in and forgot until midweek I had a wet felted flower class on Sunday. No in-progress pictures of that but I have a nice group shot of the end of class I will share with you.
Sorry For the late post, I thought today was tomorrow.
Last weekend I had four ladies for a techniques class. This is not an advanced class, but it is also not a beginner class. People had to already know how to make felt.
First, we did inclusions. They used a piece of thicker prefelt and elastics to enclose some large glass beads (the kind they are used in the bottom of vases for decoration) and a felt ball. Then laying out a base and top they enclosed some glass beads, a felt ball, a circular resist with a hole and a squashed tasimo pod with a resist over it. Sorry, I forgot to grab the camera until they were at the rubbing stage. Part way through they cut some holes on top of the beads and pod.
When they were laying out I had them cover a pebble with 2 layers in different colours. I had them put a resist on top of the first layer and wrap it with the second colour. They popped them into a piece of nylon stocking to contain it all and make it easier to felt. You can see the first sample on the table in the picture below. They mostly felted the pebbles during lunch while eating and chatting. Once it was mostly done they cut a hole in the top and after healing the cut edge removed the resist and cut a smaller hole to reveal the pebble. Similar to the one below that I made a few years ago.
Next was cracked mud. I had them layout two 10×10 pieces( top and bottom) they added painter’s tape in 2 widths and then added the top
Naturally, because it was a wet felting class, they had to do some rolling.
I had them cut the mud sections at different stages of felting, prefelt, mostly done and done. so they could see how that affects it. I think they could have used more felting before the fulling but we had limited time and had to move on to book resists. I had them make a four-page book resist using half circles. they managed to get it laid out and wet down but then we were out of time so they had to take them home to finish.
3 students sent me pictures of the finished pieces. The first one she manipulated to look like origami.
And this one, She says it needs more fulling but wanted to get me the picture.
The third student got creative and combined her samples into a tea cozy.
All in all a good class. I just wish I could squeeze more techniques in. But no matter how fast you want to be felting takes time.
Hi all, although I haven’t been doing much felting myself I have been teaching others to do it. I ran my Nunofelt scarf class again this last weekend. I had five lovely ladies at the Ottawa Valley Weavers’ and Spinners’ Guild classroom.
The first part of the class is talking about all the fibres. Students are amazed at all the kinds of silk. I usually bring hankies, tops, throwsters waste and recycled sari silk along will wool BFL locks and sparkly nylon. They get to pick their hand dyed scarf blanks and then spend at least 15 min trying to decide what embellishments they want to use. It’s lots of fun watching and helping with colour and texture choices.
Silk hankies
Silk Tops
Dyed Silk Throwsster’s waste
sari waste
Sparkly nylon
It is so hard to pick.
Then it is on to lay out the wool. Once this starts I put the silk blanks away so no one is tempted to change their mind halfway through the layout. I keep all the wool and embellishments out until they wet everything.
Everyone enjoys using the ball browser sprayers to get everything wet.
In this group, they all stayed together during the different stages of felting. Often they become staggered; someone wants to be first done and another will be very relaxed and go slower. In the end, they always finish and it’s interesting to see the different styles of learning and doing the same thing.
rubbing
rubbing
rolling
rolling
I didn’t get any pictures of the gently squishing and tossing to full but here they are finished.
nuno scarf
nuo scarf
nuno scarf
nuno scarf
nuno scarf group
nuno scarf group
All in all a great class with happy students.
The only odd thing that happened was one lady had brought her own wool, marked merino and she was sure it wasn’t superwash. She added my embellishments. One of her colours did not stick to the scarf anywhere. My first thought was it was superwash. However, it did seem to felt and grab the silk embellishments on top of it. Nowhere she had used the copper coloured wool stuck to the silk backing. It was attached by other colours surrounding it so it’s all one piece but I have no idea what was/is going on with the wool, any ideas?
I know you’re thinking, fish for Christmas? Don’t you raise turkeys? Why are you having fish? Well, we did have turkey and the traditional fixings. In this case, the fish was a present. When I asked my husband what he wanted for Christmas, he said fish.
In the last few years, he has taken to cooking, particularly new things. I appreciate this so much. I have been cooking dinner since I was 15, and I just do not want to do it any more. Anyway, his idea was he does not know how to cook fish and would like to figure it out. He thought if he got them as a present he would get on with doing that. My thinking was, if I buy fish before Christmas, it will be in the fridge too long before he has a chance to cook it, what to do? I could just make a card, I owe you some fish fillets of your choice. How boring is that?
A couple of days before Christmas I decided to make him a fish.
I drew an image of a fish and traced it onto some fulled wool from an old wool coat.
Then fixed the nose. I didn’t want to needle that close to the edge. Having done that before I know it can distort things.
Then onto the felting. I did well with following the lines not remembering until after that the easy way to do it is to lay the wool across the line, felt the line and then fold it over to the correct side.
Fish HeadTail
I decided the front was a bit plain. I thought of adding gull lines but I didn’t want them to show on the skeliton side. Instead, I made a fin separately and added it, completely forgetting to take a picture. You can see the line from it in the first picture below. It was covered by a piece of the skeleton. I didn’t want the bone lines to show on the front so I used “invisible” thread to sew the skeleton down. the felt Snakes are from scraps. when I cut open a reaist I always roll the cut of bit into a snake and then store them in a bag for later use. Then I carefully cut it out of the background.
And this is the finished fish.
He was thrilled with the fish. He loves hand/homemade gifts. So next week we will go pick out some fish.
This is my first post of 2025 so I will wish you all a Happy New Year! I hope you have a happy and healthy year.
It’s the time of year when thoughts turn to warm woolly sweaters( jumpers). So, where do they get all that wonderful wool in amazing colours? Why for colourful sheep of course. Dyed in the wool as it were. And where do you get those? Well, you make them of course. They can really spruce up a manger scene for Christmas or you can add them to the scenery of your model railroad or add a pin and wear them.
I had 8 lovely ladies to make some cute little sheep. There should have been 9 but one couldn’t make it so her sister who was there paid her materials fee and took some supplies to her so she could make a sheep at home.
After this point, once the students arrive, I forget to take pictures. We start with the legs. I show them how to make them with needle felting. It is long and tedious to make them dense enough to hold the sheep up. Then I show them how to make wet felted snakes to cut up for legs. You can see a plastic bag on the table it has the sheep samples and all the snakes I made so they could have legs and move on the the rest of the sheep. they make bodies, heads, and ears and then they needle felt them all together. they usually look a little wonky at this point and everyone has a good laugh at them and worries there sheep will not look right.
Most of them look like they are on stilts at this point. It is better to start that way and then do some hoof trimming at the end, to get the length you want.
Next is the best part, giving them their colourful ( or natural) coats. we used Bluefaced Leicester curls. they are small nice curls.
As they have all their wool, their personalities emerge.
Everyone seems happy, I will need to find out if I had any comments on the evaluation forms. Fingers crossed there are no complaints. When you teach with our guild we have the student fill out an anonymous evaluation. It helps to head off problems before they really start and sometimes you get good ideas for your next class. Students pop them into an envelope and it’s sealed. Someone else opens it and has a look and you get the feedback later.
This is my last post for the year so I hope you all have a
Last time I left you with the main part of the helmet drying. I also made a nose piece and strapping.
It seems I did not take pictures as I thought I had. I guess I must just think about taking pictures and then when I am busy working it is completely out of my mind. Jan got one of me working. I was using a darker grey to create the look of rivets as I attached the strapping and nose guard. I look so serious.
We did get lots of shots of it finished. And not so serious
Here are a couple on the hat stand in my studio
I am happy with the way it turned out. I need to make it look like it lost a battle. I wet it down again and rolled it in a towel to get most of the water out. I scrunched it into a ball and then opened it again. I think it looks like a crumpled helmet.
So then it was off to the guild Sale and Exhibition. I think we put Jan’s part and my part together the morning we opened. I think we were both too busy on set-up night to even think about it. It is all a bit of a blur.
we did a little photo shoot after the sale too it is very hard to get a good shot into the inside of the helmet.
I have no idea what to do with it now. What do you do with your projects after the show?
