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Author: zedster66

Tidying, Rediscovering, and Inspiration

Tidying, Rediscovering, and Inspiration

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I’ve been having a big tidy up this week, so haven’t had much time to make anything. And not having space to make anything is one reason for the tidy up! It’s amazing how just not putting things away properly can soon build up to one giant mess. One of the few positives to tidying up is re-discovering things. The first thing I was happy to find is a chiffon scarf I must have bought over 20 years ago. I don’t think it’s silk, but it really is nice. It looks like it was made from a larger piece:

The second small scarf I found was a silvery grey silk one which was my mum’s. I’ve thought about making a nuno piece out of it:

I bought a few large silk scarves around November last year. They’ve got sequins sewn on, and I thought I’d try one for a nuno scarf. They’re not the kind of thing I’d usually buy, but they were knocked down from £20, to £2!:

And, if you’re like me, a big part of tidying up invoves playing about with stuff you’re meant to be tidying! For some reason I kept a load of little paper hearts from the hole-punch I use on tags:

And then I found a lens from a small kaleidoscope (I used to buy them for photography!), so had to have a play. This is a soft wispy piece I made at the well being centre recently:

And this is some Kevlar fibre/thread:

One thing I did find got me thinking about Ruth’s first Quarter Challenge. Tyvek envelopes. I’ve only played around with them once, fairly recently, and just held a couple of pieces over the gas rings on the stove:

I don’t know what I’ll do with the unmelted ones yet, but they have potential!

If you have any tips for keeping tidy, feel free to leave them!

Throwback Post – Texture

Throwback Post – Texture

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We were talking about doing some ‘throwback’ posts this year, and while I was giving the site a bit of a tidy-up and adding a new 3D page over the New Year, I came across this one of mine from September 2014, and thought it’d be a good one to start with. Do you ever revisit your old work and get inspired with new ideas?

A while ago I bought a weird fluffy, knitted, tubular scarf from Poundland to try felting with. If you ever buy one, make sure you cut it over a bucket or newspaper or something to catch all the bits! I laid out a couple of layers of very wispy pink Merino tops left over from a book cover I made last year, then I added the piece of scarf, and 2 more wispy layers of wool tops. It didn’t take long to felt. This is one side of it:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThis is the other side:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAnd this is what it looked like holding it up to the sky:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI don’t remember how long after, but I decided the scarf sampler might make a nice sculptural piece similar to one I’d made before. I didn’t make it in exactly the same way, I concertina’d it and stitched in place, then twisted and felted and fulled more. This is the top:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAClose up of the ridges:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERASuper close up of the texture:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThis is the back:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAA close up of the back:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAnd a super close up of the texture:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERANow, what do I do with the other 8 square feet of fluffy knitted stuff? 🙂

The Year Ahead

The Year Ahead

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I’m ahead of myself this year, usually I start by planning to be more organised, but I bought some new tubs a few weeks ago and cleared up a few piles off my desk! And yesterday I sorted through a large box of fabric from the well being centre and put it more tidily into different bags and labelled them. One of the bags is lots of ready cut strips for making experimental nuno samplers. There are lots of unusual fabrics in there for beginners to try before they pick up any ideas of which fabrics ‘work’ and which ‘don’t’.

One of the first things I need to do this year is write a constitution for our group. We have our own light hearted rules, such as ‘You’re not allowed to be disappointed, we don’t make failures, we make unintentional discoveries’! but maybe we’ll keep that as our motto 🙂

Looking back at the things I made last year, I saw a lot of things I started to learn, but never really progressed with. One ‘unintentional discovery’ I made was that I quite like freestyle crochet:

I would like to learn how to do it properly though, so I can maybe make something, or at least freestyle a lot better! Another thing I didn’t really progress with is spinning. I did spend a few days practising and made some yarn I liked:

But I think trying to spin some Superwash, which spins about as well as it felts, put me off a bit:

I want to learn to spin on a wheel so I can knit some really cool jumpers, or at least a funky hat, but not being able to do a good job of sewing up is quite limiting:

And only really being able to knit with chunky pencil roving on fat needles is too:

So, I’d like to learn to knit better, or more, or just differently! And I’m really looking forward to the Surface Design challenges this year, I’ve already started thinking about mine for the 4th Quarter. If you missed Ruth’s post the other day, have a look here. Have you made any plans for the year ahead?

Year End Round Up

Year End Round Up

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I hope everyone’s enjoying the Holidays 🙂 I have one more scarf and scarf sample left to show you. This first one is a grey marl Merino on hand dyed cotton gauze. I blended up 4 shades of 18.5 mic Merino, 2 greys, a duck egg and black. It wasn’t very easy to get photos, they kept turning out blue!:

The sample is a fabric which might look familiar as I bought 3 scarves with the same design in different colours. I think this is the first time I tried it with 18.5 mic Merino:

Whenever we do posts looking back over the year, I think I haven’t done much, but then get surprised! I think there was a definite theme of texture and surface design for me this year, so, here’s a slide show of some of the things I’ve enjoyed making this year:

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Thanks for reading over the past year and leaving comments, I hope to see you in the New Year!

Experimenting

Experimenting

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The wet felting classes at the Well Being centre are a great time for experimenting. One of our members often brings in offcuts and scraps of fabric, so I thought I’d try some out. I used some scraps of my stranded scarves with a couple of offcuts and some 18.5 mic Merino:

I laid the wool out very finely, cobweb thin really:

The fabric offcut rippled into a nice texture:

I used just two fabrics for this one, strips from a green viscose scarf and strips from a very pale green/beige/ blue charity shop dress which I was convinced was silk until I did a burn test, very realistic imitation!

I laid the 18.5 mic Merino wool tops thicker on this piece, though they were still quite fine. I also didn’t go right upto the edges of the fabric:

The ripple textures were interesting, the viscose seemed to ripple more vertically, and the imitation silk more horizontally:

We had a new member come to the group last week, so I made a soft wispy piece with her:

Texture close up:

I hope you enjoy the hollidays/festivities these next couple of weeks 🙂

Some Different Nuno Felt Scarves

Some Different Nuno Felt Scarves

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Here are a couple more scarves I made for the recent Winter fair. I think apart from the Burgundy/Pink/Orange/Yellow one I showed last week, they were all nuno-felt scarves. Both of these were made with 18.5 mic Merino and hand dyed cotton scrim. I embellished this first one with hand dyed bamboo top:

I don’t know if you remember the nuno scarf sample I made and showed a few weeks ago using irregular pieces of scrim, but I wanted to do a few variations of that. I first cut a strip of subtley variegated lemon/yellow scrim to size, then cut the strip into roughly even pieces and re-arranged them before adding the Merino on top:

That one used similarly sized pieces, but this next one used more irregular shapes. I didn’t want to make the overall shape of the scarf quite as irregular as the sample though, just more ‘uneven’. I got out lots of pieces of scrim in blues, greens and grey shades and ironed them-apparently those big plastic craft tables bend from heat more easily than I thought! I laid the pieces out on the template, and overlapped them in places for a bit more texture. Then I chose some 18.5 mic Merino in similar colours and matched the wool layout to the scrim.

It was interesting to just follow the colours of the scrim instead of planning the colour layout, it was a lot more random:

I really like the scrim side, it is so texturey and reminds me of lots of different landscapes:

More Scarves

More Scarves

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I made a short, wide scarf/wrap similar to the white scarf I showed last time, using natural cotton scrim and 18.5 mic Merino:

It’s about 3 times as wide as the scarf, and I didn’t scrunch the scrim first:

I used 3 different cellulose fibres for embellishing this: Viscose, Rose and Tencel, this is the Viscose:

I made a few scarves for the craft fair this last weekend, the weather was predicted to be sub-zero, so I thought I’d get lucky. But this is Manchester, we all have a scarf collection and everyone had come prepared, mostly with ‘scarves’ which wouldn’t look out of place on a double bed!! This is a bright, colourful one I made, I always prefer the side where the wispy ends of the wool tops overlap (or underlap since they’re laid first) the next colour:

This is the other side where the colours are in blocks:

An ‘arty’ shot to shop how soft it is 🙂

Pre-Felt Samples and Nuno Scarf

Pre-Felt Samples and Nuno Scarf

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While I had my pre-felt out doing the Suprematist pieces, I thought I’d try a few more samples using it. I’ve only used it a few times, but the suprematist pieces were so quick to felt, I thought it might be quite handy for making small pieces for greetings cards. The first one I tried was using some fibre and cotton gauze ‘paper’ I’d made a few years ago. The pieces were already cut out, I carefully peeled off the gauze and laid them on a piece of prefelt:

I can’t remember which fibre I used, but it looks shiny and metallic in real life, like copper, bronze and graphite, not dull brown, pink and grey! The piece is quite flat:

I used some dyed Silk Carrier Rods for the other two pieces, this first one has ‘whole’ layers peeled from the rods before dyeing:

There’s a bit more texture on this piece:

I used small bits of dyed silk rods on this piece, bits which fell off during peeling or after dyeing:

This had more texture too, probably because the pieces overlapped more:

I’ve been into making scarves lately, or more precisely endlessly carding wool and ironing scrim for making scarves, but I have finished a couple. This is a white one I made a few weeks ago:

I used rose fibre for embellishing:

I cut the scarf wider than my template, and scrunch gathered it to size before adding the wool, so it’d have some texture on the back:

And it only took about half an hour to do the photos this time!

4th Quarter Challenge Part 2

4th Quarter Challenge Part 2

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I felted the Prefelt and Fibre paper Suprematist pieces that I showed you last time. I think the pieces shifted a bit, but this is the first one:

It didn’t have much texture after felting and is quite flat. The colours didn’t blend where they overlapped, but the underneath colour migrated through at the edges:

For some reason the burgundy piece was a lot fuzzier on the edges:

I did alter the second coloured one slightly, I noticed all the triangular shapes were pointing in the same direction on the same angle.

This piece was mostly flat too, the only part which isn’t is at the bottom where I used a piece of the white which is thicker/heavier prefelt:

The white piece was far more interesting before felting:

You can see from an angled photo the different textures, colours and shine better:

A close up:

The different thicknesses are more obvious on the Black and White one:

You can see how shiny the white bamboo is compared to the ‘black’ bamboo from this angle:

Close up:

I know I’m always complaining about how hard it’s been to get decent photos, but I’d forgotten how small the time frame is at this time of year where I live. I know it’s not a huge deal, no one’s expecting ‘professional’ shots on the blog, but when trying to show fibre comparisons for example, or like this week-white on white, you get massively different results depending on the time of day, or whether someone in the flats opposite opens their window just enough to direct the sun right on to your desk! So, here’s a slide show of comparisons for you of trying to photograph the white piece this week: Too late in the afternoon; Too early in the morning; Just right; Just right until neighbours open the window!

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4th Quarter Challenge

4th Quarter Challenge

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I thought I’d finally get a chance to do some felting this week, so gave the 4th quarter challenge on Suprematist Art some thought. I know it’s basically just positioning pieces of various shapes and/or sizes, but I thought the description from the Art Story site about how the simple shapes “also encouraged many Suprematists to emphasize the surface texture of the paint on canvas, this texture being another essential quality of the medium of painting”. I know it’s hard to see that texture through old photos of old paintings on a flat screen, but it sounded like an interesting angle to explore. I’d originally planned to do my base/backgrounds with wool tops, but remembered some thick white prefelt, so used that for my base. I started out with a quite simple layout of shapes cut from commercial prefelt and handmade fibre paper:

I used a few more pieces on the next one. I had to concentrate to not have ‘neat’ or regular angles!

Another thing which intrigued me about one of the key ideas of Suprematim was the ‘Zero degree’ of painting which Art Story described as ‘the point beyond which the medium could not go without ceasing to be art.’ I might be wrong, but I thought Kazimir Malevich’s White on White was a good example of the way I understood that. So, I had a go at my interpretation, though not quite so minimalist! I built up a piece using mostly the same white prefelt as the base, and some white fibre paper. It’s a long time since I made it, but I think it is bamboo. And I think the cream square in the bottom left is tussah silk paper:

The last piece is a complilation of white and grey prefelt shapes, and white and ‘black’ bamboo paper shapes:

As I was putting the last piece back onto a piece of cardboard to take downstairs, I noticed the light had changed and was picking up the textures of the prefelt/paper layers, so I took a few photos of theose. Suprematist 1:

Suprematist 2:

I love this one, I think it’s the most interesting of all of them, Suprematist 3:

And lastly, Suprematist 4

I completely underestimated how long actually constructing the pieces would take, so never did get a chance to felt them, so I’ll show the results next time.