Felting and Fiber Studio

Around mid-November I was rummaging in a chest of drawers trying to create space for visitors to store their clothes, while also thinking about  making some felt Christmas cards to sell at various events.  I came across a scarf I’d felted more than 10 years ago and never done anything with.

‘Hmmm…..’ I thought. ‘This is taking up space and I’ll never wear it.’  

Why not?  Firstly, I can’t wear wool next to my skin.  I find it way too prickly/itchy. And secondly, I didn’t like how it had felted. You could almost see the little thought bubble appear above my head: “I wonder if I could make some Christmas cards out of this?”

The scarf didn’t fit the bill for a traditional Christmassy look, but that’s one of the things that appealed to me about it. 

Let’s first go back to the scarf-making, in April / March 2014.  No, I’m not an exceptional record-keeper, I just have a lot of photos on my phone and happily they’re all automatically dated.   

I started off with a bright orange silk scarf I’d found in a charity shop. It was what I think of as raw silk: soft and loosely woven. I wasn’t even sure it would felt well but, foolish as I was in those days, it didn’t occur to me to make a sample, I just ploughed on optimistically.

I decided to add shapes in bright rainbow colours so made a big sheet of multi-coloured merino wool light prefelt, broadly following the colours of the rainbow. 

I cut circular shapes out of it and laid them along the scarf, still following the rainbow sequence. I laid orange merino round the edges and set about felting it.

When it was finished, I wasn’t very pleased with it.  The silk was unstructured and flimsy and it seemed to hang wrongly. I don’t think that type of raw silk works well as a base for felting, certainly not on its own. I didn’t take a photo of it.

I left it for a while and came back to it about a year later.  I thought maybe felting a solid wool layer on the reverse might improve the hang and structure.  I felted 2 layers of white merino onto the back.  Now it was firmer but a bit too stiff and still didn’t hang well, but in a different way. I just wasn’t happy with it.

That’s the point at which I gave up on it and popped it into a drawer. Since then it’s been shunted around but I’ve never decided what to do with it…..until now.

On to the card making. I decided simple triangular tree shapes might be nice for festive cards so I made myself a little tree template and set about the scarf with my rotary cutter. 

For the first few cards I refelted all the cut edges of each triangle.  This was nice, but took quite a long time both to do and to dry, so I decided to go with raw edges: it didn’t make a lot of difference to the appearance and it certainly speeded up the making. I cut out some different card and paper backgrounds, glued them onto cards, stuck the trees to the backgrounds and drew a stem and decorative dot on top of each tree. Mostly I used acrylic pens but where I didn’t have a suitable colour I used other permanent markers. Here’s the first batch.

Some of the triangles were a little plain and, as I had my acrylic pens out, I decided to do a bit of doodling. I admit, I was rather enjoying myself by this stage.  Perhaps I got a bit carried away (some of the trees started to look like pizza slices)!

I grouped the trees into threes, choosing ones that had three different colours on them wherever possible. I found some bright pre-cut papers and chose the nearest colours to the trees in each group. Then I swapped them around so that each tree was on a background that matched one of the others in its group.  I finished off by swapping the colours again for the dots and stems.  

Here’s a close up. The trees have green, purple and turquoise on them. I picked out the matching papers, put the lime green tree on the purple paper, the turquoise tree on the green paper and purple tree on the turquoise paper. Then I finished off with the dot and stem in the third colour that wasn’t on the tree or background paper.

It’s hard to describe just how much I was enjoying myself, though some of that may be because I was almost certainly supposed to be doing something boring like cleaning or tidying up.

I did sell some of the cards and sent a few too.  They’re not the best cards I’ve ever made but I did enjoy making them and was happy to have repurposed a scarf that didn’t really work.  I still have plenty of felt scarf left so I may do something else with it in the future.

A little later, I made some other cards that I liked better and that sold really well. 

In my charity shop moochings I recently found a really beautiful, large hand-marbled silk scarf.  It was way more expensive than anything I normally buy.  I’m normally in the £2 – £4 range for a silk scarf and this was £8.50.  However, it really was big and interesting and I was intrigued as to how well it would felt. So, I splashed the cash. The marbled dyes sit on the surface of the fabric so I wondered how well the wool fibres would penetrate the silk. Age and experience do have their advantages: this time I made a small sample to make sure it felted well, which it did.  

I cut out a long rectangle of merino and silk prefelt and laid a section of the scarf full length along it, flush with the edge of one long side and covering half of the width.  Sorry, I forgot to take a photo so I here’s a quick sketch, literally on the back of an envelope.

Once it was felted and dry, I cut it into thin strips ready for printing. I’d found a royalty-free image of a plain green fir tree and, using photoshop elements, dotted it with robins to look like baubles. I printed the images on heat transfer paper, then, using my heat press, printed a tree on some of the strips. I stuck the strips to long cards and this was the result.  Not as much fun to make as the other cards but I do like the result better.

8 ‘Robins’ cards above and a close up of one of them, below

On the remaining strips, I printed an image of a friend’s cat, to which I’d added (in photoshop) a Santa hat.  I had six felt strips for the cat but one didn’t print properly which left me with five.  I thought I’d better save one to send to the cat owner and was going to offer the other four for sale but my cat-owning friend decided he’d like to send the cards, so bought all four.  There are lots of cat and dog lovers around so maybe I’ll make some of those next year.  What do you think?

Four ‘Layla’ cards above and a close up below

While I was on a roll, I repeated the process using an animal print scarf and a blue patterned scarf to make some cards that are not season-specific. People do seem to like this type of design and quite a few say they or the recipients will cut them out to make a bookmark or just put the card in a frame. The horse chestnut is from a painting my Mum did, the honesty was composed from some photos I’d taken, the ferns were from a royalty-free image I found online and the birds are all from photos of my previous large felt pictures.

I know I’ve said it more than once before but I do love a bit of fabric re-purposing, whether second-hand or from a failed project.