More Bits

More Bits

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This week I did a few things. I put hang tags and price stickers on all the dryer balls, bags, soap and ruffle neck scarves that go to the Log Farm for sale. At shows I usually just use signs when I have groups of things that are all the same price. I delivered those and almost immediately got a call from the Museum store saying they needed more soap and dryer balls.  Yesterday I made up the dryer balls and popped them into the washer today.

I would show you what they look like done but my dryer died. Thats a job for tomorrow now.

I did however get some soap felted.

The other thing I got started on Friday(I think) was some slippers for samples for a class I have on Dec 1. I didn’t have a sample of the ear template style.

I only got as far as laying out.

They will also be a sample of Finnish wool. We use Corriedale for the class. Its a good felter without being to fine like merino and it comes in lots of colours. People seem to want colour. This will show them what another kind of wool felts up like.

That was my week. I hope you managed some felting done too.

 

Three Dimensional Encaustic

Three Dimensional Encaustic

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At our November art group meeting, Paula kindly showed us how to make three-dimensional encaustic bowls. Although this isn’t technically fiber, these are made with paper pulp to make a paper clay and I thought you all might like to see the process.

This bird is one of Paula’s creations that was in our recent show in September. The bird is made the same way that we made our bowls.

Paula already had our bowls made and ready out of paper clay so that we could do the “fun part”, adding encaustic wax.

Here’s Sally making another set of paper clay with a mixture of plaster and the paper pulp stuff that forms the base of the clay. The clay is worked into a ball and then flattened with a rolling pin to the desired thickness. Then you need something to mold it over to make a bowl shape. Sally and I created a 3D creature to try later. I made the fish and Sally shaped a bird.

Here’s Paula covering a dish with aluminum foil so that a paper clay bowl can be shaped over this surface and left to dry.

But we already had our bowls ready to go thanks to Paula so the next step is to add layers of encaustic wax with a brush. In between layers of wax, a heat gun is used to fuse the wax to the paper clay surface.

 

Once there are at least two layers of wax, you can start adding texture. This was really amazing to me how this worked. A sharp tool was used to scratch a pattern into the surface of the wax and then using a slightly cooled brush with wax,  the cooler wax was brushed over the surface and it built up over the incised line. Drips from the edges can also be added by allowing hotter wax to run down the inside or outside of the bowl’s surface. Look at those textures, now I know you all love texture. 🙂

Of course, you don’t have to add texture if you want a smoother surface. The next step was to add color with pan pastels and powdered pigments. In between layers of color, the wax needs to be fused again with the heat gun so that it will adhere to the wax. I found this to be the most difficult part as there is a fine line between fusing and melting the wax completely.

These two are Paula’s bowls. I love the depth that she achieves with different layers of color.

This is Sally’s bowl. Aren’t the leaves in the center an interesting accent?

This is Deb’s finished bowl. You really can’t see the depth of color in this photo but it looks like an ancient artifact.

Here’s my finished bowl. Can you guess the inspiration? I don’t have a photo of Louise’s finished bowl because she didn’t finish hers. She wasn’t really happy with the colors but I know that she will end up creating a wonderful bowl. Hopefully, I will get a photo of it later.

Have you tried a different media or craft lately? Do you think it gives you more creative ideas when you try something new? We had great fun learning about 3D encaustic and thank you Paula for all your help!

 

Noody-what?

Noody-what?

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I am often asked what inspires the pieces I make, the truth is inspiration can strike anywhere, sometimes it is the materials themselves, the pattern on a piece of sari silk or the tassels on a charity-shop scarf for example. Nature is another great source, the textures of a patch of lichen or orange-crimson autumnal leaves against a bright blue sky. Memories from holidays or previous careers such as watching cells growing in a petri dish from my days as a “lab rat”.

As some of you may know, I used to SCUBA dive a lot and frequently draw inspiration for my felting from the underwater world, for my new collection I couldn’t resist the gloriously colourful world of nudiranchs (pronounced noo-dee-branks). I confess I have been slightly obsessed with these little sea slugs for more than 20 years but the usual response when I try to describe them to non-divers is, “noody-what?” Their name means naked gills in latin and refers to the fern-like gill structures you can often see sprouting from their backs.

I love them because they are so outrageously colourful  and don’t seem to care who sees them strutting their stuff in the magical aquatic world. I can’t think of a better muse to create a fabulously colourful set of wearable art, deep down, who wouldn’t want to be a nudibranch? 🙂 If you google “nudibranch photos” you will get a taste of their fantastically beautiful world and the colours will be much less washed out than those in my photos.

 

Related image

The Pink Dorid nudibranch was my muse for this hat and gloves set.

Now I just need to find a human who is as exuberant and fun-loving as a nudibranch to wear them…. 😉

Well Being Centre

Well Being Centre

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I think I’ve posted a couple of photos from the Well-Being centre once or twice before, but definitely not for a while, so I thought I’d take some to share today. There were only two of us in the class, so it’s easy to see the room better. This is from the window end looking towards the door, a massive sink is on the right:

I took these photos on my phone so they’re not the best quality, but the colours are a lot better. This is from the window end again, we usually have the equipment on the side table and if we get a lot of supplies out, we put them on the grey benches under the window.

Since there was just the two of us, we put it all on the side table:

The room is used by lots of different craft groups, there are supplies and examples of work all around:

Cath was making a coaster with lots of natural wools:

She’s trying to sneak some Gotland locks while I’m taking the photo!

Action shot:

I was working on a black and purple piece with lots of undyed fibres:

As usual we ended up chatting loads and I didn’t get any more photos, but I’ll try to remember to show the finished pieces next time 🙂

A show and Picture Progress

A show and Picture Progress

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I had a show on the weekend. It was quite good. We put a big push on advertising on Facebook and Instagram and it looks like it paid off. There were more customers this year. It’s nice that everyone’s efforts paid off.

This is what my booth looked like.

I sat in the back near the mirror and worked on my Moy MacKay class picture. You can see it on the left of the table.  People were very interested and it helped to start conversations.

On the second day, I changed the table around a little to see if the little bags would go better.  It might have been a little better. people look at them a lot but they are not selling. Maybe the price is a bit high. I need to get my webpage set up to sell or get my Etsy page up and working.

This is what it looked like at the beginning of the day.

I added some more to the fences and some shadows for the ones on the left as the sun is on that side. added some purple to the left backfield to tone it down as it farther away.  The big thing I worked on mountains. The wool colours were running across, So they really didn’t look like trees. I added a thin layer of wool going the other way to make it look more like it is covered in trees. I used a greyer green so they will reseed more.

 

Now I need to add some shading to give the mountains some definition and mountainy shape. It’s coming along. At the moment I am working on the holiday card exchange. What are you working on?

 

Slow Stitching

Slow Stitching

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This is the landscape (on the left) that I showed you in my last post. I made a few changes including some new felt to indicate mountains in the distance and changing the diagonals in the foreground.  I was originally going to machine stitch this in place on its background of white felt but decided to do some “slow” stitching. So I am hand appliqueing all the pieces down. I didn’t want the machine stitch to overpower the simple shapes.

Here you can see the stitches a bit closer. I am using a machine thread and a short sharps needle to stitch each piece in place. Some of the pieces are overlapping and some are butted up against each other.

Most of the sky is stitched down and because I didn’t have a big enough piece of dark blue felt for the sky, I cut up the pieces into irregular triangles. I’m not sure if you can see or not but this is felt that had been printed and then over-dyed so there is some pattern in the sky that along with the triangular pieces is definitely giving some interest that a single, plain blue piece of felt would not display.

 

I have now started stitching down the blue mountain shapes and as I stitch, some of the felt pieces have shifted a little. I may also add either some more color to some of the mountains as the white is definitely bringing them to far forward and is distracting. But I will work on that once everything is stitched in place.

I do have a piece of silk that is shown in the upper left of this photo that I am considering using as clouds. I would have it in much smaller pieces and I’m not sure I’ll even use it but I might. What do you think? Do you think it needs clouds? Is that fabric too light in value against the really dark sky? I hope you don’t get bored with this piece as it will take me a while since I am stitching by hand.

Felting with yarns

Felting with yarns

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The challenge for this quarter is “surface decoration by twists, tubes, yarns” and I chose to use only yarns as surface decoration.

This is my inspiration photo, taken by my daughter Annie, on a local beach.  I used it to inspire my felted piece for the challenge.

inspiration photo for challenge

The first thing I see in the photo are the ropes, thick and thin, in white, orange and turquoise and there’s a lot of frayed ends.  Then at the top there’s a metal ring that may have had chain attached to it at some time, and in the middle is some tangled fibre.

I decided to make the yarn embellishments first, starting with the ropes.

I used 100% wool 4-ply yarn to make the ropes (there’s a good tutorial by ‘Textile Arts Now’ that shows how to make a twisted cord).  The thickness of the cord will depend on how many strands of yarn used to make it.

different thicknesses of cord

Note: Some 100% wool is labelled ‘Superwash’ and it won’t felt.

To distress the ends of the ropes, untwist the yarn strands.  It can be tricky – I lost a bit during the separation of the strand below – it looks like 3-ply now!

frayed yarn rope end

I used 100% wool yarn to make a chain by tying knots at regular intervals in a double length of yarn.

chain made by knotting wool yarn

A piece of this fancy yarn, after distressing, made the fibre mess I needed.

distressed fancy yarn

I wanted to add a little something that wasn’t in the inspiration photo but I still wanted it to be made from yarn.

After a quick trip to Googleland I found a lovely free knitting pattern, by ‘knittingninja’, free starfish pattern, so I made one from pink mohair.  A piece of knitting can be fairly ‘solid’ so I thought the fluffy mohair would help the starfish to felt in easily and I made the stitches a bit looser than I normally would.

starfish knitted with mohair yarn

So I then had all the components I needed – all made from yarn.

I made a base of loose yellow merino wool fibres to compose my challenge piece on.  When I’d finished I took a quick snap on my phone to check the composition – it’s much easier to see the whole thing on a screen.

quick phone snapshot to check layout

I started the felting agitation very carefully so as not to disturb the design, then turned it over and worked mainly from the back – checking the front at regular intervals.

When the yarns were loosely attached I rolled the felt until the piece felt firm.  When it was dry I trimmed the edges with a rotary cutter – the finished size is 32 x 26cm (13″ x 10″).

Strandline

 

As you can see from the close-up below, the texture is pronounced but none of the yarn embellishment moves under finger pressure!  It’s all felted in there “good ‘n’ proper”.

texture

 

Production Anxiety

Production Anxiety

Comments 36 comments

Leonor’s post got me thinking – we don’t only just post ‘positive’ things here on the blog, for example, we’ll often make mistakes, get stuck, have inspiration block, or need ideas which we ask for help with – but we don’t often talk about the harder struggles of being creative or trying to run a business with our art and creations. I know that I’ve mentioned on a few occasions the difficulties in trying to find a balance between making things I enjoy, with making things which might sell. The reality is much harsher though. Sometimes the anxiety over it makes it hard to even function and produce anything at all. You’re so scared that even after lots of consideration, the thing you decide to spend your time doing will ultimately be a complete waste, that you spend that time stressing and worrying, and do absolutely nothing.

Add to that the pressure of coming up with something to blog about every 8 days, and I’ll admit that sometimes I really hate everything about felting and fibre arts. Once you’re committed to running a blog or a business though, it isn’t that easy to just give up and stop doing it. I was meant to do a craft fair last weekend, but didn’t feel up to doing it in the end. The people who run it and about 99% of the people who attend are always lovely, but still, the pressure to sell, and stand in front of people while they judge your creations can be quite overwhelming.

I still had my boxes packed up almost a week later, and was tempted to just leave them like that till the next fair in a month. But I thought I’d unpack them, do a bit of a stock-check, and take advantage of my best friend’s fresh eyes and endless ideas to hopefully give me some new perspective and enthusiasm for making and selling. I also thought that taking some photos of my current ‘inventory’ would provide some content for my looming blog post, which I hadn’t planned to be so ‘heavy’, but then I finally tackled the backlog of blog posts I’d been too anxious to read because there were so many it seemed like a mammoth task, and the post from Leonor got me thinking about my current anxieties and how bad mental health/well-being affects productivity and creativity.

This probably sounds ridiculous to many of you, hopefully a lot more than it resonates with anyway, but I’m fairly certain there are plenty of you thinking ‘OMG, I get like that ‘ or ‘So it isn’t just me?!’. I don’t have any advice for how to overcome it, sometimes all it takes is for someone (usually Ann, oddly enough) to ask if I’ve seen a question on the forum (which I also get anxious about neglecting) and I’ll go to look, check out all the other posts I’ve missed, then finding myself inspired by colourful posts of creativity and encourageing comments, come back to the blog to tackle the backlog here! Othertimes, like today as I write this, it takes a determined effort. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading, and apologies for the unusually serious nature of the post, but for once I didn’t have to struggle to come up with content, it just wrote itself. So, here’s some photos of colourful things I’ll be selling on my Winter Fair stall in a few weeks!

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This and That

This and That

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My plan was to show you the needle felted sheep class I taught a few weeks ago but it seems I took a lot of pictures of my hand and only ended up with two group pictures at the end. So here they are:

That doesn’t seem like much so I though I would show you what my house looked like on Sunday morning. It was so pretty and I may do a felt picture of using one of the pictures for inspiration. It was only -2c and all the snow is gone now.

I have a couple of new felting tools. The first I am told is for sitting on to help with some hip problem but I found 2 of them (cheap) at the second hand store. Value Village for those who live in the USA or Canada. I will attach a strap of some sort and give it a try.

Jan Found this great foot massager for me. It should be interesting to try out.

Lastly If you signed up for the Holiday card exchange the partner names are now up on the forum holiday-exchange-2018

As you Read this I will be at my Guild Exhibitions and Sale. It’s in Ottawa Ontario Canada if you are in the area drop by and say hello. facebook.com/events/

Also, I would like to encourage anyone who would like to learn how to make felt bags to sign up for Teri Berry’s online class. Registration is now open and class begins November 22. For more information and to register, please click on the link to the Felted Bags online class.

Who could resist learning to make a cute bag like this?

 

Fossils, Landscape and Sunlight

Fossils, Landscape and Sunlight

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Now that I have completed the fossil piece, I have to decide how to finish and frame it. This is always my least favorite part of the process. I usually just want to do whatever is easiest. Now if I ever made a piece to size specifications, I could use the same backing and frame every time. But I never manage to do that. So I’m always having to look at custom ways to frame or finish. I got a lot of good suggestions from comments on my last post including:

  1. Use a larger matte board so the central piece is smaller than usual in the frame inviting close inspection.
  2. Mount on burlap with frayed edges.
  3. Use a piece of grey slate with jagged edges.

I actually like all of these suggestions but one of the first things I like to consider is the value of the matte or whatever will be surrounding the felt. I have some large pieces of grey scale paper that I use to help make my decision. Unfortunately, the light here has been nonexistent for taking photos. It has been rainy and cold. I finally resorted to taking photos with some can lights to provide the lighting.

Here’s the fossil piece on the grey scale paper from black to white (left to right). In these photos, the medium and light grey look very similar but they are different in person. Which do you prefer? I wish that the lighting was better for the photos, sorry.

I also found this piece of woven grey fabric that has a combination of values from light to dark grey. I already have enough of this fabric so since I am on the kick of “use stuff up”, I may have to go with this one. I didn’t have a piece of slate and haven’t gotten around to seeing if one piece of slate is available at the home/garden store and the burlap I have is a bright, yellow-green. That certainly won’t work.

Up next, I am working on another landscape. This is with some leftover cut pieces and scraps of felt that have various surface design techniques. Right now I am just in the process of laying out the background with a long way to go. I have decided that most of the lines seem too horizontal and evenly spaced and I need to add a bit more diagonal variety. Of course when I add stitching and foreground elements it will change. But back to the drawing board on the arrangement until I’m happy with it.

And since I told you about the poor sunlight available, I thought I would show you these photos off my front porch. I looked out the front door a couple of mornings ago and there was this beam of sunshine on the tree in front. It was amazing and only lasted for a couple of minutes. But I got some good photos. The tree is a larch or tamarack tree that looks like an evergreen but it’s needles turn golden orange in the fall, drop off and then regrow in the spring. They add some glorious color to the landscape. If you look closely in the background of the photo on the left, you will see a turkey family. And I got a closer view of one against the fall colors. He was making all kinds of noise as he seems to have misplaced his family for a moment. Feel free to click on the photos to get a closer view.