Felting and Fiber Studio

Second Quarter Challenge

April 3, 2015 Shepherdessann Comments 19 comments

This quarters challenge is using a photo to generate a colour palette to work with. Often you have a photo that has colours that are really appealing but its not easy to pick out all the colours. There are some great palette generators on line. They can help you find all the colours in a picture.

Some generators only give you a few colours some give you a complete palette. I used my Easter soap picture to try them out. Some had a hard time with the yellow and the deep pink but generated nice palettes.

These first 2 are advertised to generate palettes from photos. The first is http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/ It gives you 2 palettes from the picture but only 5 colours each. It gave me red for the pink and completely ignored the yellow.

The second one I liked was http://www.palettefx.com/ It gives you a better range of colours and the colours were more accurate to the picture. The nice thing is that if you click on any colour in the palette it gives you the compliment and the triad.

I thought some people might like to break their pictures into colour and pattern to make a felt picture. I tried a couple of cross stitch pattern generators.

This one http://www.pic2pat.com/index.en.html generates 19 possible cross stich patterns each one uses a different number of colours. It will generate a palette and pattern if you click on them.

Than I tried this one http://stitchboard.com/pages/pattern/freePatternWizard.php It will make a beading, crochet, cross stich or knitting pattern. It has lots of options and if you join( it says it is free) you have even more options. I did it as a cross stitch pattern.

I couldn’t find any for other kinds of stitching so I googled quilt pattern generator and found the Victoria and Albert museum. http://www.vam.ac.uk/microsites/quilts/patchwork It creates a much more abstract picture. You can up load your own picture or you can use pictures from the museum. The thing I didn’t like is the colours are not bright. The yellow is mustard and not sun yellow.

I hope that you find these useful and inspirational when you try this quarters challenge of using a picture to pick your palette for making a felt piece. Remember you don’t have to use all the colours in any palette and you could split it and use some in the felt and some in stitching or beading you add after the felting. Please show us what you do here: http://feltandfiberstudio.proboards.com/thread/2196/second-quarter-challenge-2015

Stitching Pomegranates

April 1, 2015 ruthlane Comments 16 comments

I posted about this piece on my personal blog a while ago. I have added a bit more hand stitching since then but it is certainly going slowly. Mainly because I haven’t worked on it much. I have gotten out of the habit of hand stitching in my spare moments. I would like to get back to it so this is an effort to get started again.

This is an old wool blanket that I used a halved pomegranate to stamp the wool with thickened red dye. I made this eons ago!

This is the first area where I added stitching. I am using seed stitches to emphasize the seeds in the pomegranate. I also added some stem stitch to several of the pomegranate edges. The thread I am using is lace weight wool that I dyed.

Here’s the second pomegranate that I have started on. It still needs more seed stitching.

Here’s a closer view. The stitches are pretty small. I haven’t decided what to do with this piece but I have some other parts of this wool blanket that coordinate with this one. I thought I might make a book cover but maybe I’ll combine the pieces to make a larger piece. Who knows. Right now I’m just trying to get in the stitching habit again. Do you have a hard time getting back into a technique you haven’t used for a while?

Oh and Happy April Fool’s Day! Hope you don’t have too many pranks played on you 🙂

Felt over Wire

March 30, 2015 Marilyn aka Pandagirl Comments 18 comments

A couple of years ago while thrift store shopping, I came across a cute little wire baby buggy. I set it aside hoping for a reason to use it.

It is 5″H x 5″ L x 2.5″ W (12.7 cm x 12.7 cm x 6.35 cm).

I made a resist with a 30% shrinkage rate added two layers of merino per side which I thought would be a nice thickness to cover the wire.

Her is the outside layer done and stretched over the form to dry.

There seemed to be plenty of extra felt around so I could turn it inside except for the very front of the buggy top.

I made the second layer and inserted it inside.

That was a little tricky since it was a tight fit for my fingers so I used my trusty scoop and crochet hooks to get it in position.

It was a tight fit and there wasn’t enough felt to overlap the front of the buggy top. I had planned to do a blanket stitch to join them but the cluster of wires on the top made it impossible to do that.

I wrapped the front with some roving I rolled into a rope, then basted the stitches together, but I didn’t like the way that looked.

So I glued the layers together both on the top and sides then pulled out the basting. Not a great plan either since I burned my fingers with the glue gun even though I was using a cuticle stick to push into place. If I had more pink roving, I would have made a resist using more over the buggy top and perhaps made a double resist for inside and out in one piece. But I had to work with what I had.

For the inside, I placed a piece of cotton batting on the wire as a mattress. Then I proceeded to wrap the wheels with white yarn and stitch on some lace around the bottom and top of the buggy.

I still have to clean it up a bit then I’ll send it off to my daughter in law for the baby’s room. I thought it would be useful to store qtips or scissors, thermometer, etc. on her dresser.

Have you ever used a wire structure with felt?

First Quarter Challenge

March 28, 2015 zedster66 Comments 16 comments

I thought I would try blending some tints and shades for the First Quarter Colour Challenge. And yes, I did have to look back to Ruth’s post, I wanted to say ‘lights and shades’ 🙂 I chose pink Merino because I have an abundance of it and didn’t really care if I messed it up and got something awful! I used ‘Hot Pink’:

I kept it simple, I blended 3 parts pink with 1 parts white, 2 each of pink and white, and 1 part pink with 3 parts white. The original is on the left:

I did the same thing with adding black:

I did start blending with my hand carders, but did a lot of it by hand. This is all the shades together:

Then I blended them all together on the drum carder with some black and white Viscose tops, white Bamboo tops and black Nylon tops to make a batt:

I might blend some of the pinks I have with some other colours to make them a bit more useable 🙂

Carding some Wool and Making some Felted Soap

March 26, 2015 Shepherdessann Comments 14 comments

After I dyed my wool last week I had to recard it into batts. I have to do this because it became slightly felted during the rinsing process after dying. I have to rinse a lot more than some people because I have hard water. It doesn’t matter if I use a little dye for soft muted colour or lots of dye for strong bright colours. To recard the fiber, I strip it down into thin ropes. I feed the ropes into the carder. I have a large electric carder but you can do this with a small hand operated drum carder too. I have in the past. I am sorry to say that yesterday I took a nice long video of the carder working but it has disappeared from my phone. All I have are a few still shots.

This is the carder and infeed table. They are in my nice new studio space. It is all by itself at the moment until I can get the rest of my stuff sorted and my husband can finish the electrical work.

Here are the strips on the infeed table and the batt coming off onto the storage drum. I do feed the wool through twice as the first time it is still a bit stripy in density . I separate the batt into thin layers and feed it in again. I end up with very nice batts.

These are all a little less than 100grams/3.5ounses. I used them to make some felted soaps. I tear off a piece of batt and wrap it around the soap. I add a wool stripe or a piece of silk hanky and then pop them into the toe of a nylon. When I have a bunch ready I sit with an audio book and wet felt them all.

Here they are all ready to go in their nice bright spring/Easter colours.

I am starting to feel like spring with the longer day light hours we are getting. it puts me more in a mood to be felting. I would feel more like spring if there wasn’t still a couple of feet of snow on my lawn. I am however thankful I do not live in the Prince Edward Island on the east coast of Canada . They have had 16 feet of snow in the last two months the last being just a few days ago. I am sure they feel like spring will never come. Are you feeling like spring? Or perhaps you are in the southern hemisphere and are starting to feel like winter is coming?

Brighter Cat Toys and Making a Few Batts

March 24, 2015 ruthlane Comments 11 comments

Last week I showed you the roving I dyed with Rit dyes and this week, I made them into cat toys as I needed some brighter colors. I have shown how I made the cat toys here.

These definitely fit into the “brighter” category. I always think it is funny when people are choosing what color they want and they have a discussion on which color they think their cat will like. Really?

I had also dyed some merino fleece so I decided a little drum carding was in order.

Here’s my set up on the coffee table in front of the television. It’s a good activity at night when I’m zoning out in front of the “boob tube”. My mom used to call it that. You can see the dyed fiber on the far left. I picked and teased it apart by hand and ran it through the carder. I got two batts out of it.

This is a slightly closer view of the carder. My hubbie got it for me for Christmas one year which was a big hit as you can imagine. It’s from Strauch Fiber Company and is very sturdy.

I had some left over green mixed breed fiber so I decided to combine them to make them a bit more interesting. They are both in the olive-green shades although the one on the left is much more yellow.

Here is a closer view of the mix of colors in one of the batts. I am trying to use up bits and pieces of wool so that I will use them so blending them into batts makes them much more interesting.

The First Quarter Color Challenge

March 22, 2015 Marilyn aka Pandagirl Comments 6 comments

I’ve been playing with the color wheel in fiber and paints for our first quarter challenge.

When I made the samples for the fiber color wheel I started out using my fingers to blend them. It took a while to get them to look like they were supposed to. (I apologize for the photos and the shadows.)

Since I needed more of the secondary colors to make the tertiary colors, I decided to use the dog brushes. I wasn’t getting the results I wanted. So, I decided to use the carder to make a bigger amount then to move on to blending tints.

Secondary orange then on to adding white, then black for tints.

I stopped with the reds. You can see the outward progression with each color group blending red with white, then red with black then down the line doing the same. Some of the colors look a little reddish brown.

Once I finished the red group I wanted to try paints. It was actually a little harder than I expected. On the left side is the acrylic, the right is watercolor.

When I started the project with fiber I was in Florida with my grandson who wanted to help me. Here is his secondary blending.

Not bad for a five year old! Had he spent more than five minutes with me, he probably would have done a better job than Grandma.

Have you tried the first quarter challenge? We’d love to see your results on the forum www.feltandfiberstudio. proboards.com

Dutch and Russian Wool

March 20, 2015 zedster66 Comments 18 comments

I got some ‘Yellowish Dutch Wool‘ from wollknoll, 34 mic ‘not suitable for felting’, it said. It seemed to felt fine for me:

I don’t know what breed it is, I’d guess Texel, maybe someone who’s bought it knows? Here’s a close up of a corner:

I Thought I’d try a variety of fibres again, so the top row is a blend of black Viscose tops and Ingeo, the narrow band in the middle is Fake Angora, and the bottom is black Bamboo and White Bamboo blended.

Different angle:

This is a close up of the Viscose and Ingeo:

And close up of the fake Angora (it has a strange feel to it, and looks kind of waxy):

Another vaguely listed wool I bought was ‘Russian-Camelhair‘. I’m guessing from the way they describe things on wollknoll, that ‘Camelhair’ is the colour, it’s more reddish though. And this is also 34 mic but ‘This wool is especially suitable for felting’. Another guess is that this is Romanov wool. It seems to be double coated like a lot of the ones I ordered. I used Ramie fibre with this:

The circular parts are Ramie that I fluffed up then patted down into little discs:

This is a close up of Ramie just fluffed up and added:

The sun came out as I was taking this, I usually try not to take photos in the sun, but I liked this one:

Have you tried any new wools or fibres lately?

Washing some Fleece

March 18, 2015 Shepherdessann Comments 16 comments

While looking for something else I found some unknown dirty wool. There was lots of nice curls so that’s probably why I kept them. There wasn’t a whole fleece but just a piece of one, enough to fit in a dish washing bowl. Here it is sitting on top of the water before I pushed it under. There is some dish soap in the water.

Here it is soaking. This is a pretty clean piece of fleece the water isn’t very dirty.

Here it is drying, and after it is dry, it is much lighter gray.

The are lots of small bits in the individual locks so I tried just combing the ends and rewetting them to bring it back together.

Unfortunately it did not word as well as I hoped. They are better and perhaps if I used them on some felt or off the edge of some felt they may come back together by the end of the felting.

Have you had any success in getting locks back together?

Dyeing Wool with Rit Dyes

March 16, 2015 ruthlane Comments 38 comments

When the Michaels store opened in Kalispell, they had a grand opening give away. You spun a wheel and chose a prize. They didn’t have very many prizes left when I got there but they had liquid Rit dye. I decided I would choose that for my prize, one for me and one for my husband!

Then it sat at home for nearly 6 months. I needed to dye some wool and Ann’s recent post reminded me that I needed some brighter colors. So I thought I would experiment with the Rit Dye and see how it worked on wool.

I got out my dye pot, filled it up to 2/3 with water, added the full bottle of fuchsia colored Rit dye and a couple of glugs of vinegar. I heated the dye up to steaming and then added some mixed 56’s wool roving.

Here it is ready to steam. I put the lid on and had the stove on low heat. I left it that way for 30 minutes.

The dye exhausted pretty well. Better than I expected actually. And the color was a nice red.

Here’s the wool before I rinsed it.

Then I did the same with the turquoise Rit dye. You can see the original color on the paper towel. I already had a bunch of blues so I decided to go for a blue-green. So I added a little bit of yellow acid dye. Not much but I didn’t measure.

And here is the pot ready to heat.

This one did not exhaust as well.

And this is green, not blue-green. I guess I added a bit too much yellow. But I think part of it was the wool took up the yellow dye better than the blue.

I then had a small amount of merino fleece left which I threw in the pot. Now that’s a better blue-green. Once I rinsed all the wool, the Rit dye held well. And the colors stayed nice and bright.

I did a few more pots of dye with acid dyes.

And here is the result. Lots of bright colors for my stash and to make more cat toys.

So if you want to try the liquid Rit dyes with wool, they will work fine. Just add in the vinegar and you can get some great colors. It’s not the dye I use all the time but hey, it was free.

Felting and Fiber Studio

An International Collective of Felt and Fiber Artists

Second Quarter Challenge

April 3, 2015 Shepherdessann Comments 19 comments

Like this:

Stitching Pomegranates

April 1, 2015 ruthlane Comments 16 comments

Like this:

Felt over Wire

March 30, 2015 Marilyn aka Pandagirl Comments 18 comments

Like this:

First Quarter Challenge

March 28, 2015 zedster66 Comments 16 comments

Like this:

Carding some Wool and Making some Felted Soap

March 26, 2015 Shepherdessann Comments 14 comments

Like this:

Brighter Cat Toys and Making a Few Batts

March 24, 2015 ruthlane Comments 11 comments

Like this:

The First Quarter Color Challenge

March 22, 2015 Marilyn aka Pandagirl Comments 6 comments

Like this:

Dutch and Russian Wool

March 20, 2015 zedster66 Comments 18 comments

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Washing some Fleece

March 18, 2015 Shepherdessann Comments 16 comments

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Dyeing Wool with Rit Dyes

March 16, 2015 ruthlane Comments 38 comments

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