Felting and Fiber Studio

Commercial birthday cards for anglers always feature pictures of men but I have a female friend who loves fishing and is an avid reader!  So this quarter’s challenge is the ideal time for me to make a feminine fishing card with a small gift of a textile bookmark.

If I’m making something small I always rummage in my scraps box because it will save time and money.

I found this nuno felt scrap (below left) from the making of a picture of a seahorse in 2015 (below right).

Sorry about the dodgy photo of the scrap but without stitching or anything else solid the camera couldn’t focus properly on the net.

I have some yellow heavyweight cotton fabric to back the nuno felt so I cut a piece a little bigger than the nuno felt then pinned the two together.  The cotton backing made stitching on the felt easier and made the back pretty.

I did ‘quilty’ stitching all over the nuno felt – it added interest and made it hardwearing.

I drew a template for the bookmark on an old piece of card.  I placed the template on the nuno felt then marked around it with an air-erasable pen to give me a sewing line.

After machine stitching the outline of the bookmark on the nuno felt, I cut it out very close to the stitching line.  The eye is just a dot from a black laundry marker.

To decorate a white card blank I used ‘Word’ to make a sheet of images to cut out.  The blue and yellow book is made from ‘shapes’ and colour filled then typed words on top (I can’t take credit for the humorous author’s name – it’s been around as long as I have), the shelf of books and fishing rod are free printables and the greeting is just typed above the rod.  I used thin card for printing the shapes.

‘Moby Dick’ has been scanned by Google so I printed off the first two pages to make an insert for the card.  The bookmark sits inside the card as a surprise when the card is opened.

I added some pencil lines to look like book pages and here’s the finished card front.

I feel like a broken record. Time flies by so fast these days, I always feel behind the eight ball. I’m trying to figure out something fiber related, our readers want to hear about, while pulling my hair out with Mom’s Alzheimer’s/Memory Care issues. Other families rarely visit their loved ones, to see incremental changes, that send up red flags. We are there every couple days, and we noticed behavior changes directly related to new medications. It’s so frustrating as her guardian, to know something isn’t right, getting a group of doctors to listen, and do something. Thank goodness we are retired, and can be available to meet whenever they are. It’s been quite a few weeks, of back and forth, and we appear to have a solution. So, you are getting a look at a mindless project I have been working on. It’s a work in progress (WIP) that I started January of 2022…and it’s time has come to get it done.

In reading recent FFS posts, it appears we are all mindful of using what we have, or finishing what we’ve started. This cosy blanket was created during Covid, to celebrate a long distance friendship: supposed to keep us warm during months of ongoing isolation. On its face, this is a basic diagonal washcloth pattern on steroids. It uses 3 strands of fingering weight yarn, held with a fluffy/fuzzy strand of lace weight yarn on a US-11 (interchangeable) circular needle. It could be any yarns you have in stash, just bump the needle size up or down as needed. It takes a lot of yarn, so be warned it will burn through your stash quickly.

I stocked up on bare yarn bases, for 4 yarn shows I booked before Covid struck, and everything went out the window. As this was a Christmas gift, I wanted a lovely blend of yarns, that would feel good against our skin. I wanted to use up the sparkling yarn (bottom, left) that wasn’t selling well, and I chose Suri Silk for my fluffy/fuzzy yarn.

Strand #3 came from my hand dyed yarns, and some from stash. Brian divided each skein in half – 50g for me, 50g for Lisa. The 10 skein colors meant we were both in each other’s blanket.

The last strand of yarn was from an enormous pile of 10g mini skeins, I traded with other yarn dyers. I pulled out minis I had duplicates of: 1 for Lisa, 1 in Capi. If you don’t have mini skeins, any strand of fingering yarn will do. However, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the interesting results that happened, each time a random 10g mini skein makes color changes appear. The photo below shows diagonal striping happening across the blanket. Notice the obvious yellow stripe (approximately 10 rows at the longest diagonal rows) created by a 10g change

Let me tell you about the i-cord edge that goes around this blanket. My BFF Lisa wanted a professional finish on the edge of the blanket. While it is possible to add an i-cord edge after the blanket is finished, Lisa knew it should be able to be knit simultaneously. It took a little trial and error to work out. You can see the nice edge it gives the blanket, and it will reign in the stretching of an unbound blanket edge. She did a wonderful job, as you can see in the photos below. It’s achieved by establishing a 2 stitch border on both ends of the row with big obnoxious stitch markers. On the first pass, you slip the marker (sm) bring yarn in front (byif) and slip 2 stitches purl-wise (sl2pw) in other words slipped without knitting. Then turning your work…on the next row…you immediately knit those 2 stitches (k2) slip the marker (sm) and knit across to the marker on the other side, sl2pw…and repeat. In the pattern you will see these abbreviations. You may want to jot down the definitions on the pattern. We are amateurs at pattern writing, so you are getting our recipe, so to speak. Apologies if it isn’t clear enough: consider a test run with scrap yarn and a smaller needle.

I finished my blanket last night, and tweaked our pattern, inserting some helpful details. I hope you might give our pattern, a test run. If you knit with cotton yarn, you’ll get a face scrubbie, or washcloth, with a very nice edge.

Capi

Oh, the rabbit hole of looking through a social media or selling platform for just that thing that will add to your stash!

If it were for only my force of will, I would never stop scrolling, but, luckily, I have commitments and a family that will grumble if I forget to provide dinner by a certain time! That usually saves me and my wallet, as I will stop my going online and not literally buy everything! Because, I do not know about you, but I simply love the idea of possibilities that all of the stuff online would give me if I just could have all of it in my own place!

All smoke and mirrors, I know, and I will never have the million years of time needed to try everything anyway, but..well, you know, hope is the great addiction, isn’t it.

So, some time ago, in the spirit of almost-scientific research (that is a clever name for it, you can get away with a lot in the name of scientific research in my house) and dazzled by my own confused fantasies, I bought a full baby Alpaca fleece from a local farm, after seeing them on a selling platform, looking up their website and getting hooked on baby Alpacas photos (ooooohhhh, they are just sooooo cute!). You will appreciate that I had started by looking for black pencil roving and, possibly, nepps: like, 50 grams of stuff or thereabout, easy to stash in one of the drawers. I obviously did not buy any roving or nepps whatsoever.

The fact is, they let you choose among different colours, and Alpaca has so many of them that you can enjoy looking at baby Alpacas for quite a long time. I saw this rust coloured dream of a fleece and just had the most amazing daydream about giving my kids the best chair/bed spreads ever, warm, feather-weight, cozy and exactly the perfect colour to match the rest of their bedroom furniture enhancing it. (Plus, reminding us of baby Alpacas!) Then I started daydreaming about making more felt Alpaca rugs for all my friends in time, and it quickly went downhill from that.

Well, the fleece is very cheap compared to buying a woven Alpaca spread, I know because I checked, Alpaca is the new cachemire they say, so I thought that I could afford to see if I could make something acceptable out of it, although I had not experience with Alpaca or with full fleeces (albeit baby fleeces) or with felting a chair rug/bedspread. Well, I mentioned that I am a hopeful daydreamer!

The farm lady of  Cold Comfort Alpaca was super kind, she answered immediately when I asked about the fleece being unwashed but not terribly soiled and with the worse dirtied parts taken off. She also gave me reassurances that the fleece was suitable for wet felting. That was about the only sensible check that I made before plunging head on into it, so I would like to point out that she was totally honest and the fleece is exactly as described. Lucky for me, as it does not smell at all, it is totally doable to keep it inside the house: I can swear it on whatever you like, because it has been living in a cardboard box in my living room ever since, so I know for sure.

(By the way, I gathered that the beginning of May is a very good time for looking for fresh baby Alpaca fleeces, if you are interested. I found them on the Cold Comfort Alpaca Store on Etsy. )

When the box arrived, I was just so excited and nervous that I had to open it straight away! And..yes! it was all I was hoping for in terms of colour and softness: my kids just wanted to dive into it and bury themselves in the rusty curly locks, and my hands just wanted to keep on gently stroking the fleece. I was totally addicted to it from the start, it was impossible not to, especially thinking about the baby Alpacas in the photos..

Well, knowing my limited time supply, I just knew that I needed to complete my wet felting in a weekend, or two maximum, or I would never get about finishing it: I will just say, yep, I was spot on on that.

I had not a very clear idea of how to accomplish my goal: it was my first rug, and of course my daydreaming severely impaired my ability to think things through properly. I now know that I should have prepared a base of mixed wool and Alpaca fibers, on which to felt the alpaca locks, whereas what I did was trying to wet felt the base of the locks together: I guess that this is a typical rookie mistake.

I spread about half the locks and fleece bits on my table, trying to keep the shading of colour naturally changing and interesting. That took me some time, and when I wetted and soaped it and started the felting process it was already a bit late, what with the kids coming to have a look every five minutes and giving their own contribution to it (ahem).

I got to rubbing the fleece lightly,  afraid that I would felt in the locks too much. Then I started the rubbing. Unfortunately, my time was not enough for a long rubbing that day, and also I was afraid to felt in the locks, I wanted time to stop every now and then and check on them, but I did not have it then.

So, I thought better to stop there, wash it and put it away for further work later on: that was not such a brilliant idea, as the fleece seemed to hold together at first under the tap, but then started to show holes everywhere! Argh!

In hindsight, I should have washed it rolled up, and very delicately, as some of our expert felters suggested when I asked for help later (of course, I asked later, because that is me). Or, better, not wash it at all until properly felted, but I was not sure how soon I could go back to work on it afterwards.

Anyway, I put it to dry flat on a rack, with the whole family stealing caresses to it as soon as it was dry enough, even though I kept telling everyone (and myself) not to do it because it was already almost cobweb felt, but no way, it was sooo soft, irresistible. The kids started taking it off the rack to bury themselves into it now and again for a cuddle and I did not have heart to tell them off much: it was right addictive. Of course the holes kept growing until I had to store it away before it was more holes than fleece!

In the meantime, I understood that I needed to re-work the rug with a backing, mixing Alpaca fiber and Merino wool. So, I selected the shortest and the dirtiest bits of fleece and started hand carding them with pet brushes, to get the Alpaca fiber.

I kept on with the carding for a while, but it was slow and messy: consider that I do not have a place outside where I can make a bit of a mess, I had to work in my living room. So, I started carding it only on the evenings before my house cleaning days: it is quite incredible the amount of vegetable matter and mud (let’s leave it at that) that were coming out of just a few locks that did not seem that full of VM in the first place! I was very quickly bored to death and annoyed by the mess, with only a small light plastic bag of carded fiber to show for it!

I admit that I was pushed to cheating, at this point, and purchased a small bag of brown Alpaca fiber on WoW (it was at discounted price!), and then felt as a traitor to our baby Ruben and dubious if it would be too dark a brown for blending well with the rest. Anyway, in the end it would be just too expensive to go on buying more carded Alpaca instead of making my own with the fleece that I already have in abundance.

And here we are, as I left my project there and did not go on carding or felting Alpaca since.

That’s a real pity, as I am still dreaming about the baby Alpaca rugs that are there, waiting for me to make them real. The box with the fleece is here in my living room, looking at me reproachfully, and my husband sometimes hints at “disposing of it or at least doing something with it”, so I guess I will have to finish my UFOs sometime soon.

I learned so much already that I think that I will be able to make a better job of it as well this time around 🙂 but if you have other tips to give me, please share them in the comments, as I am surely going back to my almost-addictively-soft baby Alpaca fleece!

Last year I wrote about my experiences putting out various fibres for the birds in Bird Nesting Balls.  This spring I have put out some new fibres to continue my experiments.

Our guild has a destash area where donated yarn and fibre is placed in our studio.  Members can adopt items and are requested to make a reasonable donation to our guild in return.  Someone had left a number of bags of dog fur on the shelf.  It was very soft, but also very short.  Pretty much unspinnable to me.  But I thought it would be perfect for a fresh set of bird nesting balls.

While discussing this plan with my guild mates a bag of Bear fiber was also produced and I was urged to take it.  While bear fibre sounds amazing, in reality it was very wirey and unpleasant.

Because I had quite a bit of fibre, I bought 3 metal rings designed to hold peanuts in the shell.

Here are the various fibres: tan dog fur, black dog fur, and bear.

I loaded the circular bird food holders with a blocks of Bear, black dog fur and tan dog fur.

Here are the holders after I stuffed them.  I also loaded a small amount of black cat fur into the blue bird holder.  (Last year the Chickadees really like the black cat fur.)  The lighter coloured fiber in the blue bird holder is llama.

Once the holders were loaded it was time to hang them up.  I spread them around the bird feeders in my front yard on April 21.  I also hung up the 2 balls I used last year, one with cream wool, and another with tan alpaca.

After a few weeks I began to notice that the holders were looking shaggy, which I assumed meant that the birds had been pulling out fibres.  But I had not witnessed the birds gathering fibres.

We have many hungry Raccoons in the neighbourhood and despite the baffle on my pole they manage to get up on the feeder.  We also have squirrels that launch themselves onto the pole and claw at things.  I recently noticed the wool holder was on the ground and falling to pieces.  So I went to the store and bought a metal cage designed to serve suet cakes.  I filled it with the wool and hung it backup.

Shortly after making this upgrade to my fibre supply station, I finally noticed a Chickadee taking fibre from one of the rings.  It looks like the black dog fur is the Chickadee’s preferred fibre.

I also managed to capture a short video.  I apologize for my dirty windows.