This is the shape I am currently working on. It started as half circles with a section flattened so I could tape them together the other way around.
I have a flower shape in my head.
I didn’t get very far before life interfered again. We had all the snow I showed you last time melt, and then another dump of snow and melt. Now the scillas are out.
Sometimes, when I think about the cuts I am planning, I think it will work, and then other times, I think no, that’s not going to work at all. Then, I started thinking about how to figure it out. The best way for me to do that is to write out how to do it. Then I had to sort out what would be the best way to try it out without having to actually make it.
I figured out a good way to model the shapes and wrote that out, but now I have to do a trial run to see if it works and if I missed anything.
It mostly worked the way I think it will, but I have another idea I am thinking about that may work better. Thinking is as far as I have gotten with that.
So far, I think the online class will be a 3-week class, with several weeks of after-class help access. How long is normal for after-class access?
Before talking about felt, I just wanted to share with our friends who have mild winters. It is March here in Central Canada, and there is very little snow left. But as I said, it’s March, and March is a fickle month. This is what I woke up to last Saturday.
March 29 snowfall.
Followed by freezing rain overnight Sunday.
March 30, freezing rain on top of snow.
Do not be feeling sorry for me. This is fairly normal here. We expect it, but I am envious of you sitting out in your gardens enjoying the spring flowers.
Now some felt. I finished up the pink sample for the book-resist workshop. I finished the pages 2 different ways just to show them. I think it might look nice with a light inside.
I made a second sample using a football shape. It is smaller.
The resist was fiddley to get out because I didn’t want a hole in it. So, didn’t want to cut a hole in the end.
After removing the resist, I sewed up the hole.
Stitching up the hole Stitching after fulling.
Here is how it looks finished. I am really pleased with it. The stitching was resistant to being pulled out, but I did get it out.
I may have to make another one. I may just have to stitch on this one. I have the wool ready for the next sample. I hope to have it done for you to see next time.
I have finished the first draft of the resist workshop. 6 pages, and I haven’t added any pictures yet. I printed it out, and I am working on the first sample. I will add notes to the draft and add in anything I missed. The first sample is a circle resist.
All stacked and ready to goTime to start rubbing
That is how far I got, one set of all the surfaces rubbed. I am going to have to find my studio microwave and set it up so I can reheat these when I get back to them.
The only other fibery thing I have done lately is spin on my drop spindle. I do this mostly when I go to guild socials. It’s a nice, portable way to work.
Here are some balls I made earlier,
The dark pink has some silk in it, I think it came from Louet a long time ago. The light blue and purple is from a batt I bought at a fiber show. The other three I made on my blending board. They are meino and sari silk. I like the pops of colour and slight slubbiness it gives the yarn.
Now, I am working on a sample pack from World of Wool. I got it last year. I am just getting to it now. They no longer sell this wool. It is Merino and Stelina (metallic-coated nylon). The Stelina is very sparlkely.
I did the yellow first, mostly for a change. I don’t do much yellow. It is hard to get the sparkle with the camera but there is lots of it. As usual, I found it stuck to several things when I pulled my laundry out of the dryer. It really does get everywhere.
That’s it for my fiberiness for the last little while. I hope everyone is coming out of the winter blues and into the joys of spring. I am looking forward to being able to sit in the garden, in the sun and enjoy my felting and fibers among the flowers and bird song.
When teaching my vessels workshop a few weeks ago, I was showing the class pictures and talking about some more advanced vessels. They expressed an interest in all of them but especially in the book resist vessels. It got me thinking and now I am planning to give an intermediate vessel workshop later in the year, or maybe the new year, depending on scheduling.
At this point, my plan is to make 3 samples. That will help me write down the order and figure out how to teach it. I need to work out the materials list and timing, as well as how to teach it. Making them will also help me think of where things might go wrong.
I know there will have to be a prerequisite of having made at least one item, and preferably 2 or more items over a resist.
I plan on 3 different vessels. The first is a simple 6-sided circle pot.
The second one is more oval shaped vessel, I cut down the paper template from the circle so they will be about the same height when done.
And the last has an “odd” shape, again I used the half circle from the circle to draw the new shape to keep them about the same size.
As with most best laid plans, I discovered all I had for tape was narrow painters tape. So I will have to head to the store for some wide, strong tape that will hopefully stay stuck through the wet process of making a vessel. In the meantime, I think I will start writing the instruction so I can jot down additions as I go. I am not sure how long it will take to do all that. If I want to teach it in the fall through my guild, I will need to get the proposal in when the call for workshops goes out in the spring.
I’m always buying second hand fabric to use in felt-making. Mostly scarves but occasionally garments or just pieces of fabric, almost always from charity shops. Much of the time, I have a good idea of how the fabric will felt. But sometimes I really don’t know, either because it’s unusual in some way or because I’m not sure what it’s made of.
This week I tried out (or ‘auditioned’) four such fabrics, so here’s what I found.
Firstly, this soft rather loose-weave fabric I found in the British Red Cross shop in Canterbury.
Large soft scarf laid outClose up of fabric
The ‘prickle test’: I touched it lightly to my neck and it prickled so I concluded it contained at least some wool. I have an annoyingly sensitive skin that can’t wear even the softest wool so this prickle is a good sign. It’s a big scarf and I really like the pattern so I bought it, even though it was a bit more than I’d normally pay. I could imagine using it in a tree picture like this one I talked out in a previous blog.
I cut off a very miserly small strip then decided to make it even smaller – a 5 x 5 cm square (2 x 2 inches) – I just wanted to see if it felted without wasting any. I had a tiny amount of miscellaneous white carded batt loitering on the side of my felting table so I used that to felt it.
As you see, it felted really well so I set up a bigger strip to make some cards.
Then I decided not to get ahead of myself so put that on one side to pick up later and got on to fabric number two.
This flowery mesh fabric was from a scarf I bought a while ago. I think I bought it in Faversham Hospices of Hope.
I’ve used fabric similar to this to make barnacles on felt shells before, though it had a smaller woven pattern. I’ve no idea what either fabric is made from.
Barnacles added to a felted oyster shell using a similar fabric
This time I decided to make a slightly larger sample I could use to make cards, assuming it felted OK. Sometimes I just throw caution to the wind!
I laid it on a piece of the merino & silk prefelt I use for my printed felt cards and felted it.
Ready to felt (left) and felted (right)
It felted nicely. The mesh didn’t bed into the wool as much as I’d expected, so it’s more textured between the flowers, which was interesting. I will cut this into four strips and print something on the plain half to make cards like the ones I’ve shown in the next section.
I decided I liked the idea of a larger sample for cards rather than the tiny sample I can’t use.
So, here is fabric three.
I bought this a couple of weeks ago in Yorkshire Cancer Research in Ilkley. It feels like it might be a very sheer silk but there’s no label and I’m not sure. Hand rolled hems are often an indication of silk but this has machined hems. I love the pattern and it didn’t cost too much so I decided to take a chance.
Irritatingly, I cut the silk a bit too small for the prefelt rectangle offcut I was using so I popped a second small strip on the end hoping it would make that end useable.
It felted really easily and well, so I’m pretty sure it is indeed a sheer silk. I can see lots of uses for this as it has such a ‘coastal’ pattern. Also, I think the join worked OK.
It’s similar to another scarf I’ve used recently for pictures and cards, so I’m very happy. One of the drawbacks of using second hand scarves is that you can’t go and buy more of the same if you decide you really like it.
A similar scarf I’ve used in previous pictures and cards
And finally, a large, fairly open weave, 100% wool scarf I bought in a Pilgrim’s Hospice shop in Whitstable. No need for the prickle test (though it would undoubtedly have passed) as it still has its label.
I dithered over this one even though it wasn’t expensive. I just wasn’t sure I’d use that much brown. It’s also quite bulky and I’m short of storage space. However, I decided I could use the brown for beach pebbles on pictures and the animal print sections won me over. I love a bit of animal print.
Wool fabric laid out on prefelt (left) and after felting (right). It doesn’t look much different here though, felted, it’s shrunk by about 30%
Actually, I really like the result, more than I expected for some reason. I find that wool fabric felts really evenly – not surprisingly, I suppose. The fabric shrinks with the prefelt rather than rouching like silk does. I will use this sample piece for cards but I’m not sure what I’ll use the rest of the scarf for. It definitely reminds me of an animal’s fur but I’m not sure quite what animal.
Well, all four fabrics passed the auditions with flying colours. They all felted well. I can immediately see how I’ll use the first (wool mix?) one and the sheer silk. I’ll mentally ‘file’ the other two for use at some point in the future.
I love looking out for second-hand fabrics. You never know what you’ll find and what you might be able to do with them. A delicious pre-loved scarf always feels to me like some kind of exciting unearthed treasure.
For a long time, I have been promising myself that I would take a workshop to get some sort of grip on how to use a spinning wheel. My friend Trish Kerr runs Irish Alpaca Yarns and she has for a long time been offering me a space on one of her spinning workshops – the stars never aligned as, invariably I was busy on the day. Then, in December, the offer was once again made and, I was actually free! The beautiful venue was not far away, Cornstown House (https://cornstownhouse.ie/) which was not far away from me. Happy days! Unfortunately there was a huge storm the night before but, despite fallen trees, we awoke to a clear bright day and I negotiated my way to the venue.
We were spinning using alpaca fibre. I hadn’t realised it until then but some people who have an allergy to wool fibre can wear alpaca. The irritant in wool apparently is the scales and alpaca does not have scales.
There were 5 students and some had previous experience. Luckily Trish is an amazing teacher. I had warned her that, given my hideous coordination when learning something new, that this could put a serious strain on our friendship. She laughed it off. Trish has great patience which she got to draw on in bucket loads when it came to teaching yours truly!
We were working off Louet wheelswhich she supplied. She is quite an expert on the older more traditional wheels too, and she was able to offer good advice on how to get an old wheel which a student had brought, back working again.
A traditional wheel one of the students brought in for some advice
What a beauty, owned I think by our host Fionnuala
All she wanted were cuddles
Trish got us all set up and was very attentive throughout the morning. The first skill we worked on was treadling, as a first timer it took a lot of effort but after a while I had the wheel moving in a clockwise direction. She set us up with alpaca fibre and soon we were all spinning. Some (by this I mean most) much better than yours truly here. But I was having fun.
Trish started us all off drafting setting us up with Alpaca yarn
The morning flew and we stopped for a delicious lunch and tour of the farm, both supplied by our most gracious hosts, Fionnuala and Dominic. The tour was great fun, featuring lots of Alpacas, some rare breed sheep (including one that loved to be patted, a cow and donkeys. The farm offers Alpaca Trekking and workshops along with other events. When I explained that I primarily was a feltmaker and showed an interest in the Teeswater, Dominic disappeared for a few minutes and arrived back with some raw fleece for me to play with when I got home.
I had to include this photo. The pumpkin was still going strong!
She just wanted cuddles
Chatting up the girls!
The donkeys were very friendly, and happy out if you had a carrot in hand!
Just look at that pretty face!
What a beauty!
Those eyes!
When we returned from our tour, Trish gave us a presentation on alpaca fleeces which was very interesting.
So soft and of course no lanolin!
Trish showed us what to expect from a quality fleece
We plied our yarn in the afternoon. Now that I had ‘mastered’ the clockwise, introducing the ‘counter-clockwise’ was, let’s say, interesting. This is what I produced. It is, I believe, kindly referred to as ‘Art Yarn’. Now, I am in the horns of a dilemma. I want to spin more but I don’t want to ever spin a nice even ply. The general consensus in the room was that once you perfect the spin you can’t return to the Art Yarn. Now, while I appreciate that at my learning speed, perfection is a long way down the road. I don’t want to get there but I would like to spin more art yard and, if I’m honest, I would love a new toy in a spinning wheel. Any ideas?
My plied alpaca art yarn
I played with the Teeswater when I got home. Here is the result:
Scouring the teeswater
Final view
another view,lit by LED
A view of my experiment with Teeswater
Last year, I wrote up a number of posts about various dyeing workshops I had attended. In one I dyed a lot of fabric samples and wondered what I should do with them. I think it may have been Ruth who suggested that I could think about stitching into some. I have never embroidered by hand before but decided to give it a try over Christmas. Here is my first effort. I was inspired by a photo online. Once completed, I padded it with some cotton batting and backed it with linen. I might frame it at some stage but I will need to find a suitable frame.
Using the dyed fabric samples, I tried my hand at embroidery over Christmas
I totally enjoyed my day spinning, even though I was pretty dreadful at it. But I love the result and for once, I really don’t want to improve greatly at this. Long live Art Yarn!
Do you agree? Any hints and tips on how I can retain my current standard? All suggestions will be very gratefully taken on board. I’m just looking for an excuse to buy a wheel.
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 spindle
spindle case with medium spindle
Medium 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.
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?
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.
Scarf I made more than 10 years agoView of scarf from the other end
‘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.
Light ‘rainbow’ prefelt
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.
Original scarf layout
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.
Cutting up the scarf to make triangle tree shapes
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.
