If you recall I did a small slow stitch piece in January. Look here if you missed it: https://feltingandfiberstudio.com/2024/01/26/slow-stitch-on-felt/ I enjoyed it so much that I thought I should do one a month. They are not very big, 4 inches by 5 inches or 10 cm by 13 cm. The base and all the bits and pieces fit in a sandwich bag in my purse.
February has Valentine’s Day so I decided on a heart theme. I rummaged through some offcuts and found this piece with lots of silk embedded in the surface.
I then had fun going through my threads to pick out my colour palette. Mostly pinks and a contrast. Later I will add a dark blue as a contrast.
As you can imagine with this being a slow stitch project and a portable one I didn’t take as many pictures as I should have but I think I have enough to show my progress through the month.
I wasn’t sure where to start so added the month and a felt heart with a simple outline stitch heart to make it pop a little. You can see I was thinking about the second heart when I remembered to take a picture
Some were online I saw someone stitching over an object and wanted to try it. I wove some pink floss over it. I didn’t like the white and did try to carefully cut it out but that did not work at all. The cardboard was much too stiff.
so I did some unstitching and then tried again. this time I took a Ferrero Rocher Chocolate wrapper and after smoothing it out some, covered the heart. and tried again.
Just as an aside I was very disappointed in my Quality Street chocolates this year when I discovered they were in waxed paper. One of my favourite things to do at Christmas as a child and now was to flatten and smooth out the foil and transparent plastic wrapper. I know it’s more environmentally responsible to not use shiny plastic and foil but it is just not the same.
Anyway here is my foil heart.
I added more hearts as the month went on.
You can see in the last picture I added some multi-strand multi-coloured colonial knots, here’s a close-up. I didn’t like them they just didn’t seem to have anything to do with the other part of the piece. I was hoping the multi-colours would tie them in but it didn’t.
So out they came. I decided that scattering little X’s around to represent kisses would work better.
Here is the finished piece for February.
I know there are no X’s on the left edge but I did that on purpose, with a view to making them a book later and that would be the bound edge. So now I am on to March, You will have to wait to see what it ends up.
My local art group has been playing with collage for our last several meetings. We usually find an interesting online video to “follow” and then take off with the basic ideas from the video.
The first attempt was with small squares on a page and using a limited palette in all the squares. Then add some markmaking with different tools, small pieces of paper glued in place; then more mark making on top. This is my attempt at the technique. I wasn’t able to attend our meeting so I didn’t get any photos of my friends work.
The next video suggest starting with an old gelli plate print glued into the sketchbook. Then to “randomly” add collage, printing and painting on top “without thinking too much”. I never seem to do well with this type of activity as it gets way too jumbled and nothing ends up looking good to me.
Here’s where we were working and you can see my hideous collage results in the foreground of the photo. There are many layers and thinking a bit more about my choices might have improved this mess.
Here’s the final outcome of my collage. Still pretty hideous to me.
Sally created two collages using up a lot of her eco printed papers that she had in her stash.
Louise was still working on hers but had a great start.
And here’s Paula’s effort. She was working on two pages in a spread. I don’t think she was finished with these yet.
The nice thing about this project was using up painted and printed paper from our stash and just allowing ourselves to play a bit. Even though I wasn’t happy with my outcome, I had fun messing around 😉
Just before Christmas, there was a discussion about all sorts of ways to modify colour on felted pieces. The topic of Inktense pencils and paint blocks came up and they fascinated me. So I decided to give myself a gift of experimentation for Christmas.
The basic box has twelve colours. I didn’t get the box with white. This might have been a mistake, but the block is available as a single unit so if the need is evident I’ll see about ordering one.
The blocks are water soluble and can be used the same as any watercolour. They do not re-wet once dry do can be painted over after set. This is the intriguing bit for me. I cracked out all the old equipment and some new to test the flexibility of these blocks.
Watercolour mixing bowl, watercolour brushes,
And some fabric that I knew would come in handy for something someday. This was unbleached cotton, a very fine weave and perfect for experimenting. I have no idea what its original purpose might have been, but I have loads of the stuff.
The first experiments were just smearing water onto the bars, and then painting the wash onto the fabric. The wash was thicker and thicker with each brush stroke. Then I tried stamping with some tiny stamps, to see if thick paint worked better than thin.
I had hoped to use the stamping method to mimic the aurora borealis to use on my 75th Anniversary bag as background for the moose, but getting the aurora right is very, very tricky. This is the best I could do on the first try.
It needs much more work before I could ever be satisfied with this. So the next few experiments involved painting on wet fabric, painting with a dry brush, etc, etc. and waiting for the material to dry. Then washing the goods in scalding hot water to see if everything was colour fast.
If you look very, very carefully, you might see a tiny little bit of blue in the middle. That’s how much the tiny blue stamp transferred to the paper towel I used to blot the test fabric when drying.
The uses for these paints/inks still have me curious. I want to do a warp with multiple layers of colours. I just need to work out the logistics of the method. I can see using them in combination with stitchery and felting to really embellish fine art. On a practical side, they can repair dye loss in all areas of fiber design from the finest to the most prosaic. I will be using the hot pink to repair a dye loss on one of my favourite sweaters. The match isn’t perfect, but close enough
As January started I found I wanted something unimportant to fiddle with. You know something that didn’t have a deadline, had to be made for a class or show, or have any practical purpose. I had been sorting through all my bits and pieces of felt that accumulate, the ones that may be good for a picture or are just too good or interesting to get rid of. I was trying to sort them into possible uses and tidy up my area of the living room. I wasn’t very successful at either of those things but I did manage to get the felt into sizes.
I decided a slow stitch, random sampler sort of thing would be good. I had lots of small pieces to choose from. I chose a quite dark piece with some lumps on it. I have fiddled with the picture to show the colours properly. This is the best I can do. The dark green is darker or maybe deeper. The light areas are not as light as they show. The shine on the silk areas is causing a lot of bounce back and messing with the colours.
I think I used the rest of this strip of felt for a needle book. I marked out the year before I remembered to take a picture.
Next was picking out some threads. I wanted to stay with the same palette. They are different brands but all 6-strand floss
I started with the year. Strangely, the 4 was the hardest number.
I thought it might look interesting to make a flower on one of the bumps. I used lazy daisy stitch and colonial knots
I added some little leaves under the flower. I did them 4 ways but they are too small to see the stitches properly. They look like leaves so that’s good enough. I wanted to do something else with another bump and did this wheel sort of thing. I didn’t like it but I lived with it for a few days trying to think of a way to improve it.
In the end, I just decided it was just ugly and I cut the the stitches off. I added another lazy daisy with much looser petals and added a contrasting stitch to the middles and I used stem stitch and outline stitch to a…. swirl? ….curly queue? not sure what you call it but I like them.
Next was a bug for one of the bumps. It doesn’t look in but he is nice and round. I added a stem and leaf to the daisy and another swirl thing but in back stitch.
The swirl looks very white, even though it is cream. It stands out too much so I took it off and changed it to a darker colour. I also did stem or maybe its outline stitch. I can not remember, left stitches are one and right stitches are the other. Both give a much smoother line than back stitch.
I like the light streak of silk on the right and thought it looked like a tall flower so that was the next step. I used colonial knots and French knots for the flowers.
That’s as far as I am. I am going to add some more arms to the swirls but not sure what else. I was thinking I might stitch the month on it and start a new one on Feb 1 and see if I can keep it going all year. Then I will have to figure out how to make it into a book like Ruth does.
Having just read Kiki’s tutorial https://feltingandfiberstudio.com/2023/11/19/left-overs-yessss/ on using up prefelt scraps, it occurs to me that I may not have mentioned something we used to do at our Guild (Dorset Guild of Weavers Spinners & Dyers) mainly to raise funds for the Guild but also for fun.
When I attended the Stitch and Creative Crafts Show at the Bath and West Showground in Shepton Mallet (Somerset, UK) back in 2010 – I saw a stand selling (for £8.00 each) bags containing 35gr of silk fibres, yarns, fabrics scraps, carrier rods and cocoons in various colours, left over from old projects which, when put together, made a fascinating collection for future projects. So fascinating that I bought three of them.
They must have made quite a bit of profit on them because they appeared mainly to be the “waste” from artwork.
At that time (when I was part of the sub-committee organising the Guild’s Exhibition and Sale of Work) we were looking for a Guild Project which could be part of the exhibition or something hopefully to help raise some funds. Well, I thought, our weavers must have lots of off-cuts of hand woven fabric, not to mention warp ends. Then there were the spinners who would have odd bits of spun and unspun fibres of all types and colours. We also had members who were dressmakers, beaders and embroiderers, and a soft furnisher, who were bound to have the odd bits and pieces that they didn’t really need. So, with the blessing of the committee, I put it to the members in the next newsletter that if they would donate to the Guild any odd bits of fibres, yarns, threads, warp ends, bits of fabric, beads, button, feathers, felt, cords, braids, tassels, sequins, sequin waste, ribbons, silk flowers and any other bits and pieces they could think of, we could make up some “Bags of Inspiration” and sell them to members of the public at our open days and outside demonstrations. (I don’t know about in the rest of the world, but in the UK the word “bags” means “lots of” as well as “containers”, so the punning name “Bags of Inspiration” seemed apt.)
We used A4 sized polythene bags (which I was able to buy quite cheaply from our local green grocer) with an A4 sheet of card inside for stiffening, and I made up some stickers with the Guild’s logo on and a brief description of the contents, and posters also giving details of the contents.
Bag of Inspiration Poster
We arranged a few bag making days at a pub in the village where our then President lived. She had persuaded them to let us use their skittle alley at no charge, and we had a great deal of fun making up the bags and tucking in to “refreshments” from the bar and kitchen.
The members who came to these, brought with them all sorts of goodies which we spread out on tables, so that we could make collections of pieces which seemed to go with each other. Those who didn’t think that their colour theory was good enough, could pick out a picture from a selection of magazines and have a go at matching colours from this It was amazing how compulsive making the bags became. You could pick up a piece of fabric that looked so dull and dreary and be amazed how it perked up and positively shone with life when paired with different fabrics, yarns, trimmings etc. You just couldn’t stop picking up likely bits. The difficulty was keeping the weight of each bag between 80gr and 100gr, so we quite often ended up making up at least 2 bags with similar contents.
Equipment & Extra “Bits” for making up BagsProspective contents of at least one Bag of Inspiration
We put a price of £3.50 on each bag and they went like hot cakes – we sold out on their first appearance at our exhibition and sale of work. Embroiderers and mixed media artists in particular liked them.
After a couple of years, we didn’t get so many volunteers to make up bags but we still had mountains of “stuff”. So we added another string for our open days – Pick and Mix Your Own. I had remembered that Woolworths (now there’s a blast from the past) used to have a counter full of different sweets and you could take a bowl and pick and mix what you wanted, and in the process buying a lot more than you would have if just buying a ready filled bag.
Pick and Mix Sweets.
It worked with our stuff too. We gave the visitors the polythene bags and they could wade through all the bits and pieces picking what they needed, and we weighed them when they’d finished, charging £3.50 for 100gr.
We had had a lot of fibres donated so we started making up what are now called Art Batts and selling them as “Batts of Inspirations”, but because we were mainly selling these to Guild spinners and felt makers, they didn’t do quite so well as they were mainly able to make their own.
In all we made around £1000.00 for the Guild in the four years we were doing this. Eventually though the members got fed up with spending time on making up the bags and the whole thing was shelved, as the Guild seemed to be relatively well off at the time.
Some time after that I took the idea back to myself and I was making up Batts to sell at Guild meetings, using luxury fibres as well as merino and synthetic fibres. I made up some bands to fix around the Batts detailing the various fibres included in each.
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I was also making up and selling Bags, mainly at a Needlework Festival in Dorset where most of the vendors were selling materials and equipment for crafters, as well as various craft fairs and so on.
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I was getting the odd question like “they’re lovely but what do you do with them?” and “can you make a bag out of what’s in here?” So I made a sign from images of items that I’d made myself over the years and that helped.
Some of the things I’ve made with the contents of BoI over the years
However, once Covid started causing problems, my selling opportunities dried up. I had been intending to try selling Bags and Batts via my website, but it was very difficult and too time consuming to photograph the Bags so that the contents were visible, because of reflections on the polythene bags. So that sort of died a death too and I’ve now shelved that project, and am using the bits and pieces I’ve collected over the years on theatrical costumes and props.
Perhaps some of our readers’ organisations, like Ann & Jan’s OVWSG, might use this idea to raise funds?
I thought I would update you on my progress in my junk journal Tree Specimen book. I use up left over paint to paint pages after I have worked on another project. So most of these are plaster pages that I have added to.
This shows the progression of one of the pages. I had painted the background with walnut ink (I think, but it was a while ago). The ink didn’t stain a portion of what I think was a medium that was mixed into the plaster. I don’t have a picture of just the white but it is the lichen portion. I decided to add a variety of blue green paints to represent lichen on bark.
This page was using leftover yellow paint. That was way too bright for me! So I added a variety of oil pastels and rubbed them in. I think this page needs more added to the layers. It doesn’t feel finished yet.
This page I had already painted the plaster background. I had made a few rubbings on tissue paper of my California poppy foliage. It looked very tree like so I used matte medium to put the tissue paper on to the background. Does it need more?
I have shown you the pine cone page before but I am thinking of adding the bit of machine stitched moss on the bottom left and the label at the top left. The page feels more balanced with the additions.
This is another plaster page where I added walnut ink. That’s the first layer. Who knows what will go on top.
Here’s a photo of the book open. It’s such fun to page through now. I only have a few more completely white pages that need some color. I always have fun getting the book out and adding a bit here and a bit there.
I am getting ready to teach a group how to make felted sheep, Like these I used for a post, quite a while ago.
The class is this evening( Wednesday) so freshly made cute sheep will be next week. I like to use Blue Faced Leicester sheep curls for this as they are nice small curls. I had a few colours but not enough variety.
I had a couple hundred grams of the white so it was time to dye. My usual dye pot is really big. a stock pot. Much too big for this job. YOu will have to trust me on the next part as I forgot to take pictures. I was doing too many things at once. I have a nice large stew pot that isn’t too deep but I want to use it for stew again so I got a metal bowl that could be sacrificed and created a double boiler. I placed handfuls of soaked white locks into a medium freezer bag. I made up a small amount of dye poured it on top of the locks and topped it up with water until everything was submerged. I squeezed most of the are out and popped the bag into the water on the top of the double boiler. I did the next colour the same and popped it in as well. I could do 2 at a time. I made up 3 more colours. the aim was to have dark purple, lilac, lime green, pink and magenta. this method was great. the top edge of the bag was above the water so I could easily pick it up to see if the water was clear. Once clear I took it out and put it aside to cool. this is also a good idea when you dye. to leave the wool in the dye bath until cool, especially if it refuses to take up all the colour. You will usually find that when cooled it often has taken up the extra dye. I have to admit I seldom do this as I need to get the next batch of wool into the dye pot, reusing the dye water. With the small bags, it was easy to put them aside to cool.
This is the result.
Now, you are probably thinking that there seems to be more than one dark purple. That is because I used way too much lilac in the lilac dye bag. I ended up with the 2 purples in the middle. the top one in truth is quite vibrant and the bottom one more deep with a little lilac leaning wool on one edge. I had hoped it would split giving me a purple and blue mix. There is even a warning on the Dharma chart saying it can split. No such luck, isn’t that always the way? They looked so much the same when they were wet I did another batch and although it looks kind of dark here on my screen, it is pretty much lilac. I tried to adjust the colour but then the green started to look kinda funky.
So that’s my prep for the class. This is an easy class for me because everything I need fits in one small bin.
Like Leonor, I have been spinning. Unlike Leonor, all I ever make are small skeins. I like to use my drop spindles and make little bits for in my felting.
I’ve been spinning some of World of Wool’s peacock fibre. It is in the process of being played. I think the sparkle shows. It is 87.5% Corriedale Wool and 12.5% rainbow trilobal Nylon.
It has a lovely sparkle and I really like it. Which is a good thing because I have 500 grams of it. I split a kg with Jan but she doesn’t like it, so may have to buy it back from her. Or maybe she will sell it at the upcoming Guild sale. Then she could use the money to buy different wool.
I do most of my spinning these days at guild socials. As long as Jan doesn’t have a giant pile of books for me to put away. This is one I finished plying last Monday. I used the ball winder at the guild and then plyed it and made it into a ball again. It is much faster than doing it by hand but not as zen. Jan made a video of me using the ball winder. I don’t like this one it made a lopsided ball.
I can’t remember what fibre this is, merino and silk I think but I am not sure.
I have a zip lock freezer bag I keep in my basket that I put the finished balls in. This is what else was already in there. You may have seen them before but I can’t remember.
This is one I got at a festival. I think I showed you the fibre but not the spinning. It has lots of bits and bobs in it and some sparkle.
This one is from a World of Wool Bambino sample pack. It is 85% Merino Wool and 15% Bamboo. I think it is called Hickory Dickory It spins very nicely.
Now I have to decide what to spin next. Maybe I will card myself some rolags.
It is time to do some stitching on my visor cover. Stitching on felt is something I really enjoy. It feels nice to stitch on felt, It has texture even when it is smooth. You can feel the needle pass through the thickness of it.
I had people at my guild comment that the actual piece looked a lot more vibrant than it did on the screen. I fiddled with the colour a bit so I hope it looks a little better this time. It looks very bright on my screen. The crazy thing is it is sitting on the black, top of my laptop. I am getting some serious light bounce off the black.
I picked out some threads I think go with the colours. I need to find a “greener” green something in the middle I think but that requires digging in the mostly unpacked studio so it will have to wait.
I am a slow stitcher. I know I am not alone in this. There’s a whole movement called slow stitch. It suits me, stitching when I have a bit of time but with no deadline in sight.
I started with the turquoise green on the forest green part of the leaf. I thought it looked like a nice contrast even if it was still green. then I forgot to take a picture of just that stitching or rather I was probably intending to take a picture of just the stitching and forgot what I was doing. So you get to see the contrasting orange I picked for the next part too. It’s a deep orange leaning towards burnt orange.
I did the first part in rice stitch. It’s fun to do but harder than you think to make it look random.
I tried an uneven long stitch for this part and didn’t like it. It was messy but not messy enough to seem like I did it on purpose just unpractised. Of course it was but we don’t want to advertise that too much, so I removed it.
The other nice thing about stitching on felt is when you take out stitches, it doesn’t show like it would on muslin or cotton fabric. I decided to do something else with the dark orange and a lighter orange for the cross stitching. I am not sure it is busy enough. I will leave it for now. I am also not sure it was worth changing oranges either.
Now I am onto wonder woman. I am hoping to stop it from looking like wonder woman and more like a flower with the stitching. However, I started with the “cape”. I am using the lighter orange. I am adding X’s as I liked the way they looked on the leaf. I tried looking online for open background or filler stitches but I am calling it the wrong thing, I think. Everything that Google gave me, were stitches to completely cover a space. I know I have seen them before. Does anyone know the right term?
That’s as far as I am. Well maybe a bit farther as I am writing a bit ahead as I will be busy baking for the Thanksgiving Day farmers market. In Canada, we celebrate earlier than our American friends and this year is earlier than usual on October 9th. with any luck, I will have a little time to do some stitching.
My last post was about an art retreat and normally, I would just have one a year to tell you about. But this year, I had two only weeks apart. This is the annual retreat that my small art group does in late summer/early fall at the Kiwanis Lodge on Little Bitterroot Lake.
This is the view off the deck of the lodge. The weather was a bit cool and rainy but so much better than smoky skies from wildfires.
This year we decided to play around with making our own natural inks, printing and painting with the inks and then doing some bookmaking.
Before anyone points out that many of these types of ink are fugitive and might not last, we realize that. We were just playing around to see what happens and what colors we could get as a result. No “serious” artwork is being made from these inks.
We started by grinding up Haskap berries (Fly Honeysuckle) with a bit of water and straining the result. That is the bright red color on one of the acrylic printing plates in the foreground of the left hand photo. We also ground up beets, grass and kale and tried grinding choke cherries. The choke cherries were a disaster but Sally tried boiling them after she got home and got much better results than the fresh berries.
So Paula had gotten all of us some acrylic printing plates which we covered with ink and then let dry. We left watercolor paper in a baggie with water to get damp overnight and then printed the next morning. The two photos on the left show different prints and the photo on the right was painting haskap berry ink on to a page and soaking three squares of felt in the ink and laying these down on the paper. The ink changed colors depending on oxidization and what paper it was applied to.
This is the book we referred to for various recipes and what mordants or modifiers to use with different foraged materials.
I also added further ink (oak gall with ferrous sulfate) to one of my prints with my new fountain pens. I wanted to get used to using the fountain pens so this was good practice.
We then set about making a bunch of inks including hibiscus, acorn caps, acorn caps with ferrous sulfate, oak gall with ferrous sulfate, avocado, turmeric, blue pea flower and walnut ink. Paula also brought copper ink which takes several weeks to make but is the most beautiful blue. We put these in small individual jars with a whole clove to keep the ink from molding. These are now stored in the refrigerator in hopes of keeping them good a bit longer. These should be used fairly quickly. Paula had some that she had stored in the fridge for 6 months or so and they were mostly dull and brown and had lost their original color.
We then set about making little samples of the colors from these various inks. And then you can start adding the different inks together and see how they mix on the page. Such fun!
Our next set of experiments were with blue pea flower. Apparently, you can buy this as a tea. All you do is steep the blue pea flowers and then add different modifiers. The modifiers that we used were baking powder, baking soda, vinegar, cream of tartar and vinegar. The modifiers change the color of the ink.
Here is some lovely sampling of the different colors that you can get from the blue pea flower inks. They range from green to blue green to blue to purple.
Here are a couple of landscapes that I painted with blue pea flower dye. I love how they mix on the paper and the variations that you get.
You can also paint your paper with blue pea flower ink and then drop dry modifiers on top such as baking powder or baking soda. You really get some interesting effects with that.
We did put some ink on shibori folded tissue paper that could then be overlaid on previously inked watercolor paper and glued down to make bookmarks.
Paula supplied us with white paper coasters and we played with ink on those too. The left is a combination of walnut ink, acorn caps and oak gall. The right is blue pea flower and hibiscus with baking soda dropped on top while still wet.
Here a three of the books that I created at the retreat. The middle one was using a bit too thin paper which had not been ironed so it is a little sad. But I learned how to fold the triangular pages which was fun. I was using papers that I had previously printed with deconstructed screen printing.
I took my tree specimen book with me and painted one of the plastered pages with oak gall. The photo on the left shows that page which was interesting. The photo on the right is Sally’s book where she has collage parts of the page and added oak gall ink to as well.
We had the best time and thanks to Paula for most of our supplies. We also want to thank the Kalispell Kiwanis Club for letting us stay at the lodge each year!
Watercolour mixing bowl, watercolour brushes,
