Cellulose Fibers
Cellulose fibres are produced from plants. Probably the most well known plant based fibres are cotton, flax, hemp and viscose. There have been many more plant based fibres available to fibre artists in recent years, with bamboo, banana and ramie being very popular, readily available and inexpensive. Fibres like cotton, banana, flax, hemp and ramie are produced directly from the plant, whereas fibres like bamboo, viscose, seacell and rose fibre are ‘regenerated’, that is, they are broken down to the cellulose of the plant and the fibre is manufactured from that. They are often referred to as ‘semi-synthetic’. All cellulose based fibres can be dyed with fibre reactive dyes whether they are more natural ones or regenerated.
Please visit our Plant Based Fibers Gallery.
NICE WORK……..
Would viscose in small amount mixed with wool felt?
Hi Laurie, yes it does. You can blend the viscose in with the wool or use it as surface decoration/embellishment. How much you use will give you varying results. If the wool/Viscose blend is 50/50 you will get a looser, more cobwebby type of felt. If you type ‘viscose’ into the search box you’ll get lots of blog posts featuring Viscose (tops and staple fibre) used in various ways.
Have you experimented with flax/linen fibres blended with wool? Long line or tow linen. I have a friend who has asked me to try felting with some tow linen blended with my icelandic wool. I would love to hear your thoughts.
Hi Helen, yeah I’ve used flax lots, it’s one of my favourites. I don’t think I’ve used it with Icelandic though, so if you use it I’d love to see your results. If you put ‘flax’ into the Search box at the top you’ll find posts where flax is mentioned. It’s one of the fibres I tend to use as a surface embellishment rather than blending.