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Author: zedster66

Felt Birdpods and natural wool

Felt Birdpods and natural wool

Comments 14 comments

I really liked the way my first bird pod turned out last week, so I decided to make a couple more. I recently got some dark brown Corriedale and thought it wold be nice to try one with that. Like the first one, I started off with a couple of layers of Merino, natural brown this time, and again added the locks before the top two layers of Corriedale. I added some washed Gotland fleece and some bamboo fibre to the top for extra interest and really liked how it turned out. The bamboo started to look ‘rusty’ in places. I gave this to my mum today and she really liked it.

The last pod I made was an all white one for my girlfriend. I made this a little larger because I wanted to use extra locks. I started this one with two layers of English 56s. The locks I used were Teeswater, Mohair and older Angora goat locks. Teeswater locks are really long, some of the ones I had were 15 or 16 inches, I used those across the top to come out at both sides. The top two layers were merino 64s, then for extra texture I added some combed teeswater tops, Angora and Mohair locks, some very crimpy Bluefaced Leicester, and some carded bamboo fibre. Even if we never get birds nesting in these, they’ll look good with the locks swaying in the wind 🙂

Staying with the ‘natural’ theme, one of my other natural wool and fibre combinations I tried recently was grey Norwegian tops and Milk protein fibre. I liked the way the crimp and wave of the Norwegian wool appeared after felting, it really gave it an interesting texture. And the way it pulled on the milk protein fibre, which was already waving from being pulled by the shrinking felt, gave that an interesting texture too, and made it more rippley. I really like the way those two worked together. I’d be interested in any of your favourite wool and fibre combinations.

Grey Wools and Banana Fibre

Grey Wools and Banana Fibre

Comments 16 comments

Sometimes, the wool and fibres I’m using don’t felt the way I expect them to. This was the case recently when I tried banana fibre with grey Suffolk wool tops. We often say there’s no bad wool, just the right wool for the job. I’d say that was true for wool and fibre combinations too. The banana fibre I used came as combed tops, but I fluffed it up and placed hair-ball like bits of fibre dotted around on top of a couple of layers of the Suffolk. I really didn’t expect the result I got, it was the most unusual effect I’ve seen with fibres and wool so far. Although the banana did felt onto the Suffolk somewhat, it wasn’t firmly attached and gave interesting cobweb like results. The banana fibre in the top right corner reminded me of the compact cocoon-like spiderwebs you find in crevices. Or all over trees and fields after flooding (eek!) 🙂

I finally got around to trying out Ann’s bird pods this week 🙂 The first couple of layers are grey Merino, then I added lots of raw Gotland locks around the edges and added a couple of layers of Gotland roving that Kaz sent me a while back. To finish, I used some carded Gotland fleece and a few wisps of banana fibre. It is about 11.5 inches tall and about 7.5 across the middle. I mainly get small birds here, so the hole is only about an inch in diameter.

There are a couple of new uploads in the Tutorials section of the site. The first is How to make roving from silk hankies on the Fiber Preparation page, and on the ‘Other‘ page, is a short guide to taking photos of felt and fibres. They are both in PDF format and can be downloaded.

More Natural Wools and Fibres

More Natural Wools and Fibres

Comments 10 comments

Another couple of natural wool and natural fibre combinations I’ve used recently are Oatmeal Bluefaced Leicester with Ingeo top, and Humbug Jacob Tops with black and white Bamboo tops.

Humbug Jacob tops are a stripey blend of black and white Jacob wool tops. Just on its own it produces a nice result, but I thought I’d try using strips of black and white bamboo tops for effect. Both bamboos are really soft, white bamboo looks silky, but black bamboo is fluffy and more like fluffy cat fur. They felt quite differently too, the white keeps its silkiness and shines really nicely, and the black almost fades into the background, staying very matt.

Ingeo is made from corn, it is soft and shiny and smells faintly of caramel 🙂 I decided to cover the whole piece with Ingeo as it has such a lovely sheen. This was another fibre which shone even in dim light. The effect after drying is gorgeous, Ingeo is such a nice silky fibre and went really well with the Oatmeal Bluefaced Leicester. I think this combination would make a lovely soft and shiny scarf.

Natural Wools and Natural Fibres

Natural Wools and Natural Fibres

Comments 9 comments

One of the projects I’ve been working on in the last few months is using natural coloured wools with natural ‘other’ felting fibres. It’s not always easy working out which fibre will match with which colour wool because they often look very different when felted, and some fibres which seem to felt well on most wools, suddenly don’t with another. A couple of natural fibres I really like are soybean fibre and flax (linen).

Flax looks like dried grass, it doesn’t look like it’d felt very well, but it does.  I used it here with natural brown Merino tops.

Flax Fibre
 

Merino and Flax before felting

After felting it is a lot softer and shinier than before. 

Merino and Flax after felting

Soybean top is gorgeous. It is soft, golden yellow and much shinier than silk. I used it with some natural black Jacob tops. After felting, I’d left it to dry on a table, and walking past, I saw the soybean top shining like gold in the dim light. I took a few photos hoping it’d show up and was really surprised when it did. It looked gorgeous. It wasn’t as easy to capture the true colour and shine once it had dried, but it really is a gorgeous fibre.

Soybean top
Jacob and Soybean top drying
Jacob and Soybean top

Do you have any favourite natural fibres and wool breeds?

Hairy Alpaca Bag

Hairy Alpaca Bag

Comments 14 comments

I thought I’d use my weird Hairy Alpaca bag for practising stitching. I’ve used some of the stitches from the first few weeks of TAST. First, I used Photoshop to work out the pattern I wanted to follow on the flap. I used a 6 point star and copied and pasted it, overlaying it to get the shapes I wanted. I scanned the bag so I could get the sizing right, then I printed the pattern out. I thought it’d be really fiddly, but I just held the pattern in place as I stitched around for the outline. I then filled in the shapes with very close blanket/buttonhole stitch and straight stitches for the tiny blocks.

For the front part, I used rows of chain stitch to make a border, then filled that it with herringbone stitch. Just for something extra, I added little straight stitches where the herringbones crossed.

It’s not very easy to sew on, it really does feel like hair! And the bag is so small, it’s easier to keep one hand inside and sew two handed 🙂 I’m not sure what I’ll add next, I might see what other stitches come up on TAST before deciding.

Hairy Alpaca and a Merino Vessel

Hairy Alpaca and a Merino Vessel

Comments 11 comments

I love alpaca, so a few years ago when my mum was buying me fibres for Christmas, I asked for Alpaca tops. I’d only used raw alpaca before and hoped the tops would be more convenient. They couldn’t have been further from raw alpaca if they’d tried. I’m sure all alpaca tops aren’t like this, but it seems I got some made from guard hair or something! They were thick and wiry and kind of stiff. I hoped they’d be different after felting, so I made a sample square. It was the weirdest felt I’d ever made, hairy and although felted, didn’t really feel felted, and strangely, still quite soft. So, I put those bags at the bottom of a sack and forgot about them.

I recently did a ‘stock check’ to see what I needed to order more of and rediscovered the alpaca tops. I left them out hoping I’d get time to try them again. Last week I did. I decided to make a small bag with a flap. I thought that if it turned out strange I could always use it for sewing on. It turned out exactly as I’d remembered! Hairy, stiff, not feeling like it was felted, but oddly soft. I used a rusty colour for the inside layers and aptly, a grassy green colour for the top ones. I’ve already started to add the stitches, so I’ll post about that soon 🙂

I had more success with my merino vessel. I thought I’d try making a vessel starting with a flat resist. I thought it’d be less fiddly and messy than felting over a ball, but I didn’t think so. I think if I do it again I’ll use something a bit thicker than bubblewrap for the resist. It came out alright though, but it’s a bit thin because I only used a couple of layers of merino.

I’d be interested to know if anyone else has had similar problems with commercial alpaca tops or if you’ve actually had some nice ones.

Surface Texture Challenge – Mouldy Cheese

Surface Texture Challenge – Mouldy Cheese

Comments 12 comments

A couple of weeks ago I joked that I’d found inspiration for Ruth’s Texture Challenge in my fridge. I wasn’t really joking 🙂 I’ve always liked the look of mould, but there was a really nice looking piece of mouldy cheese that I thought would be perfect for the Challenge. I didn’t get to photograph it straight away, and the mould had grown a little more than I liked by the time I did, but it still looked good. I discovered that photographing mould is as ‘easy’ as photographing felt, so it’s not a great photo, sorry.

Mouldy Cheese

 I started with a couple of layers of merino to get the shape, then I blended different amounts of greens and mustardy merino shades with some plastic fibre for the main mouldy parts and used white prefelt and wool nepps for the white parts, then I wet felted it. I didn’t get the colours quite right, but I like the way it looks and it was fun to do. Now I’m wondering where I should look next for inspiration? 🙂

Felt
Merino and Hemp pouch

Merino and Hemp pouch

Comments 14 comments

Just before Christmas, Karen sent me some gorgeous fibres. One of the fibres was hemp. A couple of days ago I made a small pouch from Merino wool with the hemp as a surface embellishment.

I didn’t really intend to make a pouch, I was planning to make an unusual shaped vessel. I started by laying a piece of cotton gauze in the centre of a rectangular template, then added a couple of layers of merino and the hemp fibre on top. Just after I’d wetted it all down, I saw a 3d resist I’d used previously and thought that would work better than what I’d planned to use. I lay the resist on the felt (the resist is basically a couple of lightbulb boxes wrapped in bubblewrap and packing tape), then wrapped the felt around, snipping it in a couple of places to overlap. When it was almost felted, I removed the resist and shaped the bottom and sides to soften the edges.

I was really pleased with the way it turned out, especially the way the hemp looked with the white merino, and the texture of the gauze inside is really nice, too.

Our Etsy Store

Our Etsy Store

Comments 4 comments

Since starting the website a couple of months ago, we’ve had lots of great comments and interesting feedback. Some of the things we’ve noticed since starting the site, and more recently, the forum, is that more people would experiment with different fibres if they were more easily available and not quite so expensive.

So, we’ve opened an etsy store 🙂 The four of us have all been felting for quite a few years now and all have our favourite fibre suppliers, both locally and internationally. It’s not our aim to make a profit from selling fibres, but to use that knowledge, along with our own skills to source fibres and felting supplies and make them more accessible and affordable, especially to beginners who would like to try sample sizes without having to pay extra for them.

We’ve started with a silk fibre sample pack. This has 20g each of silk hankies, silk noil, silk carrier rods and silk throwsters waste. We’ll be adding more items as they become available. We’ve already had lots of feedback on the forum about the kinds of things people are interested in: samples of plastic, nylon, viscose and cotton fibres; handmade yarn samples; a sample pack of different silk fabrics; buttons and beads, and sewing threads; and embellishment fibres.

We’ll be keeping our eyes out for bargains or offers that we can then pass on through etsy but we’d love to hear from you if you have any ideas for things you’d like to see. There’s a button on the sidebar to take you to etsy or just click the link below. Feel free to contact us on etsy if you have any specific requests 🙂

http://www.etsy.com/shop/FeltandFiberStudio

Surface Texture Challenge

Surface Texture Challenge

Comments 6 comments

I’ve been thinking about Ruth’s Studio challenge and taking lots of photos of anything with an interesting texture.

It was really frosty here earlier in the week, so I got lots of nice photos from the garden and nearby park. After looking round the garden and seeing lots of frosty moss, I started working on my first piece. Of course, when I downloaded the photos, this was one that didn’t come out. I blended some different shades of green merino tops, then layed out a couple of layers in an ‘organic’ shape. I then blended some shades of green merino with different amounts of plastic fibre and layed this on top. After it was felted, instead of rolling as I’d usually do, I scrunched the felt as I rinsed the soap out and after squeezing the water out, scrunched it again to give it its shape.

Frosty Moss
Frosty Moss Texture

 I’m really enjoying this challenge. If you’d like to join in, and show us what you’ve made, post a comment to any of the 2012 First quarter challenge posts and link us to what you’ve made, or join our flickr group and add your photos there. Don’t forget to tag them with “surface texture challenge”.