If you recall I did a small slow stitch piece in January. Look here if you missed it: https://feltingandfiberstudio.com/2024/01/26/slow-stitch-on-felt/ I enjoyed it so much that I thought I should do one a month. They are not very big, 4 inches by 5 inches or 10 cm by 13 cm. The base and all the bits and pieces fit in a sandwich bag in my purse.
February has Valentine’s Day so I decided on a heart theme. I rummaged through some offcuts and found this piece with lots of silk embedded in the surface.
I then had fun going through my threads to pick out my colour palette. Mostly pinks and a contrast. Later I will add a dark blue as a contrast.
As you can imagine with this being a slow stitch project and a portable one I didn’t take as many pictures as I should have but I think I have enough to show my progress through the month.
I wasn’t sure where to start so added the month and a felt heart with a simple outline stitch heart to make it pop a little. You can see I was thinking about the second heart when I remembered to take a picture
Some were online I saw someone stitching over an object and wanted to try it. I wove some pink floss over it. I didn’t like the white and did try to carefully cut it out but that did not work at all. The cardboard was much too stiff.
so I did some unstitching and then tried again. this time I took a Ferrero Rocher Chocolate wrapper and after smoothing it out some, covered the heart. and tried again.
Just as an aside I was very disappointed in my Quality Street chocolates this year when I discovered they were in waxed paper. One of my favourite things to do at Christmas as a child and now was to flatten and smooth out the foil and transparent plastic wrapper. I know it’s more environmentally responsible to not use shiny plastic and foil but it is just not the same.
Anyway here is my foil heart.
I added more hearts as the month went on.
You can see in the last picture I added some multi-strand multi-coloured colonial knots, here’s a close-up. I didn’t like them they just didn’t seem to have anything to do with the other part of the piece. I was hoping the multi-colours would tie them in but it didn’t.
So out they came. I decided that scattering little X’s around to represent kisses would work better.
Here is the finished piece for February.
I know there are no X’s on the left edge but I did that on purpose, with a view to making them a book later and that would be the bound edge. So now I am on to March, You will have to wait to see what it ends up.
My local art group has been playing with collage for our last several meetings. We usually find an interesting online video to “follow” and then take off with the basic ideas from the video.
The first attempt was with small squares on a page and using a limited palette in all the squares. Then add some markmaking with different tools, small pieces of paper glued in place; then more mark making on top. This is my attempt at the technique. I wasn’t able to attend our meeting so I didn’t get any photos of my friends work.
The next video suggest starting with an old gelli plate print glued into the sketchbook. Then to “randomly” add collage, printing and painting on top “without thinking too much”. I never seem to do well with this type of activity as it gets way too jumbled and nothing ends up looking good to me.
Here’s where we were working and you can see my hideous collage results in the foreground of the photo. There are many layers and thinking a bit more about my choices might have improved this mess.
Here’s the final outcome of my collage. Still pretty hideous to me.
Sally created two collages using up a lot of her eco printed papers that she had in her stash.
Louise was still working on hers but had a great start.
And here’s Paula’s effort. She was working on two pages in a spread. I don’t think she was finished with these yet.
The nice thing about this project was using up painted and printed paper from our stash and just allowing ourselves to play a bit. Even though I wasn’t happy with my outcome, I had fun messing around 😉
In my last post I was talking (among other things) about a 6-week residency I have in a local Michelin-starred restaurant that starts on 2 April. Here’s a link in case you missed it or want a reminder.
In this blog I’m offering a quick look at the pictures I’ve made (or am part-way through making) since then. I don’t have the space (or time!) to describe the making processes in a lot of detail but do ask questions in the comments section if you want to know more about something.
The restaurant owners suggested I’d need about 40 pictures to fill the 3+ rooms. I don’t have a lot of spare pictures kicking about – my felt picture making is usually fairly hand-to-mouth – so I really have my work cut out to make enough new work to fill the restaurant walls.
At the time of my last blog, I’d made 1 large and 3 smaller pictures. I then did a series of 4 slightly impressionistic ‘estuary water’ smaller pieces. I live on the north Kent coast of SE England and although it looks like ‘sea’, the stretch of water at the bottom of my road is technically the Thames estuary.
Top left to bottom right: Spring, Summer, Autumn & Winter
Spring is lightly pre-felted cobweb felts in blue and white laid on a pewter-coloured layer of wool that has a green layer underneath it.
For Summer I made some prefelts which I cut into shapes to try to give the impression of the shifting colours of calm water.
Dry layout for ‘Summer’; a combination of merino prefelt and tops
Autumn is altogether more turbulent with a lot of pewter-colour in the water. The estuary is often quite murky-looking. I’ve used either or angora or wool locks for the small wave crests.
And winter, like spring, is white and blue cobweb prefelt on a pewter background, but this time with more of the pewter showing and with pewter for both base layers, no green.
While rummaging through my extensive fibre collection, I came across a lovely hank of hand-dyed wool and silk fibres that I’d bought while on holiday in the USA. I decided to use this for a larger water picture.
Large sea pattern 2: final picture waiting to be framed, the layout and the fibre. The colour representation isn’t very good – the colours in the finished picture are warmer than they look in the photo.
I thought it was time to have a go at a larger bird picture. I’ve previously featured lapwings in a felt picture and thought I’d like to have another go at those. Lapwings are beautiful birds with iridescent feathers that appear to change colour depending on the light. I’d seen a large flock of them at a nearby nature reserve at Oare Marshes. Sorry the quality of these photos is poor, and you can’t see the birds’ colours, but I wanted to show you the lapwings I saw and what their environment looks like.
I started off with some nuno prefelt for lapwing 1 to try to capture that iridescence. These are mostly silk but the black is velvet devore, which I thought might work for the neck feathers. I laid out a bird-shape in white then cut the coloured prefelt to make wing feathers. While I was on a roll, I made another 2 lapwings, testing out different ways of trying to capture the birds’ colours.
Left to right: the layouts for lapwing 1, prefelt for lapwing 1, lapwing 3 and lapwing 2.
Here are the wet-felted bodies that I will needle felt into 2 backgrounds as I add the features: eyes, beaks and legs.
Top to bottom: lapwings 1, 3 and 2.
Oare Marshes is a fantastic place to see birds – with a great variety of migratory, overwintering and breeding wetland birds. However, as you can see in my photos, it’s not a conventionally ‘pretty’ place. I want to locate the birds properly so there’s a challenge in making a picture that is appealing while also being representative of the nature reserve.
This is the background for the solo lapwing (lapwing 2!). I’ve used 2 different sections of recycled silk scarves for the land section and merino wool for the water – with a few strips of one of the scarves to look like pebble and mud outcrops. Next comes the lapwing which will be needle felted into place and have its features added.
And here is the final picture
Lapwing, Oare Marshes
For the other two lapwings I decide to focus on the water rather than the land. Here’s the finished picture, with the lapwings needle felted into place.
I really love watching the birds that visit or live along the coast here. Oystercatchers are very distinctive black and white birds with bright orange eyes and beaks. This is the layout of a coastal background for an oystercatcher. The foreground is made from cut-up prefelt pieces that I’ve made, including some recycled silk fabric; the background is a piece of a beautiful charity shop silk scarf, and I used mostly kid mohair for the wave foam, with a few wool locks.
Here’s the oystercatcher’s body, needle felted into place, then given its eye, beak and legs. The beak is some orange felt I’ve made previously and the legs are recycled tapestry wool. I like how the kid mohair has a wiggly texture.
With an eye on getting the picture numbers up, I branched out a bit and decided to make some smaller monochrome pictures using a commercial merino and silk prefelt with a recycled wool scarf for the foreground. I then printed tree silhouettes onto them.
Once I’d pretty much used up the wool fabric, I tried out some pieces of monochrome silk. This is work in progress as I haven’t yet printed trees onto the other pieces. These aren’t my usual style but it’s good to mix things up a bit and they are comparatively quick to make. I may not put all of these into the restaurant but it’s good to have some options.
In the interest of continuing to mix things up, I then made a larger sea pattern, trying to capture the light and reflections that dance across the water.
And then, most recently, another big bird picture, this time of a curlew. Curlews are the largest European wading birds. They have long, curved beaks and very patterned feathers. Like oystercatchers, curlews can often be seen within a very short walk of my home. The best time to spot them, and lots of other birds, is as the tide starts to go out. They feed along the line of the retreating water. They have a very distinctive call and you can often hear them before seeing them. Unlike oystercatchers, curlews’ (and lapwings’) UK conservation status is ‘red’, which means they are either globally threatened, have a long historical UK population decline or there’s been at least a 50% decline in the UK breeding population over the last 25 years.
Here’s the final curlew picture: cut up prefelt for the pebbles; blue cobweb prefelt over a pewter background for the water; the bird wet felted separately then needle felted into place and given an eye, beak and legs. The beak is made from short lengths of variegated wool yarn and the legs from tapestry wool. The yarn, tapestry wool and silk fabric in the pebbles were all bought in charity shops. I really like the idea of recycling whenever I can, and it’s great that the charities benefit as well.
In the last couple of days I’ve been making 3D oyster and mussel shells. I haven’t decided exactly how I will use these yet, some kind of pictures.
Today I made a light background for one of the mussel shells. It’s still damp in this photo. I think the sea foam area will become lighter as it dries.
I’m still a long way from 40 pictures, although I did have a few already made before I started this picture-making marathon. Now I’ve more or less cleared my diary and I’ve got the rest of March to make more pictures, and to frame them all. I wonder what I’ll do with my spare time?!
I’d be really interested to know what you think so please do leave comments if you have them.
If you follow my personal blog you probably already know that I set myself a challenge at the end of December:
To explore a different folded / pleated shape every day
In common with a lot of creatives, I tend to flit from one project to the next, not always finishing the first project before the next exciting, “new shiny thing” catches my attention. By setting myself this challenge I hoped to focus on one topic for a while and really push the boundaries to develop some new ideas, shapes and designs in felt-making.
This post is my edited highlights from the first 30 days of this challenge, if you would like to see the whole journey, all of the different shapes and more of the thought processes involved behind each piece please start here:
I have long been inspired by Andrea Noeske-Porada, a felt artist best known for her origami pieces. For years I had believed her to be the designer of the kaleidocyle:
This is my attempt to make one
But after my first post in this series, Henny van Tussenbroek got in touch, it turns out Andrea was just the first person to make one in felt, the original designer was in fact a Dutch mathematician-artist, (MC Escher) and author of this book:
Thank you Henny for sharing this information and correcting my assumption!
This book is a quite a slim volume but it is a fascinating read. I was lucky enough to find a second hand copy here in New Zealand and it is one of best creative books I own. If you would like some help to figure out the pattern for a kaleidocyle, I highly recommend getting a copy.
I have made a few items based on the designs in this book, some have turned out better than others!
Using various books on origami for inspiration and templates, I have made dozens of different shapes form paper and card, these are just a few:
And recreated a few of my favourites in felt:
Let me know if you have been playing along too, these journeys are so much more fun when taken with others! 🙂
Needle Felting, Safety First, reducing the need for Band-Aids (so far in 4 groups)
While Needle felting is fabulous fun, it can get a bit, hummm, bloody, if not done carefully. Initial eye-hand coordination can be less than accurate, accidently glancing at the T.V. while continuing to stab or just excessive speed and depth enthusiasm may require another box of Band-Aids. I have suggested to my students that audio books or mellow music rather than watching TV or YouTube while working with needles will greatly slow the requirement for first aid. Sometimes initial enthusiasm for stabbing, with felting needles, may require further methods of separation (fingers from pointy bits).
I had originally started this investigation for options to use with the electric needle felting machines that Ann and I had purchased last year (wow time is moving quickly). I expanded my looking to include protection while using handheld needles too.
Finger protection can be helpful when working in both 2-D and 3-D felting. Most of the Fabulous finger protectors I found are definitely not originally designed as felting tools. I would like to show you what I have found. With the increased appointments I am chauffeuring my hubby to each week my time to felt and write blogs has suddenly decreased.
Let’s see what I have found for keeping the pointy end of the needle away from your innocent fingers
Group 1 Brush cleaning tools
Let’s start with tools originally used to clean brushes, (usually used on hair brushes). I have examples of two shapes of these brushes, the rake shape and the well-spread bristle clumps. I have them in both a plastic and wire bristle version.
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1.1-1.2 Brush cleaning tools. (Not originally meant for felting)
I started with the mettle-toothed rake, it’s similar to the clover tool brush cleaner but has a lot more teeth. It held the wisp of wool as I used the needle to attach it to the picture. I had ordered a similar item but with fewer wires as well but unfortunately, they all arrived exactly the same. (The fewer wires may have given a better view of the image I was working on).
1.3 “Hair Brush Comb Cleaner Tool”
The plastic version of this tool did not grab the fibre and gave a bit better visibility of the understructure you are working on. It is also less expensive than the mettle with a wooden handle version. I was quite pleased with this tool, and think it would be helpful for those who are a bit distracted when using needles.
1.4 “Plastic Comb Cleaner”
The second type of brush cleaner is the flat clumped bristle wooden handled brush. It is similar to the ones I have seen used to clean suede shoes.
1.5 Small wire bristle brush used to hold down wisp of fibre as it is impaled by the felting needle (T-38-333, if you were curious)
I found that the twisted nature of the wire had a slight tendency to grab loose bits of fibre that I was working with.
1.6 the wires were catching loose bits of fibre but did hold down what I was working on.
The plastic version did not seem so attached to the fibre I was trying to work with.
1.7 Plastic bristle brush cleaner with flat wooden handle.
Both were easy to hold and I could see the work surface with both of them. They do get your fingers a bit closer to the sharp end of the needle but not unreasonably dangerously close. Of this group, I think the two plastic options were more effective but not so much so I would go buy either of them if I already had the mettle version. If you see either at a dollar or discount store take a look at them and see what you think.
The Clover brush tool is also in this group but has wandered off into one of the boxes or bags that came back from teaching last weekend, it is not to be found at the moment. I have used it effectively to hold fiber while I worked as well as some of my students. The wire teeth are more flexible and have wider spacing than the brush-cleaning wooden handled ones I have recently acquired. Unfortunately, it was quite a bit more expensive. If you see one, second-hand, you may want to grab it!
1.8 Clover brush cleaning tool
I will stop here tonight and show you the next group next post. I am still very busy driving my husband to rehabilitation appointments, and doctor visits, as well as doing errands, shopping and trying to work in time to get my felt square finished and have fun writing blog posts. I have four groups of things, to keep your fingers and needles separated, in hopes of greatly dropping the profits made by the bandaid company (though IKEA used to have cute ones with cats on them!!)
Sorry if this is popping up for you for the second time. I had to remove it last time because I posted on the wrong day. It seems I can’t read a calendar.
Last Saturday I taught a felted hat class. I had 6 students doing a variety of styles. I was sure I took more pictures but they are not on my camera so I must be doing something wrong. Thankfully, some of my students had pictures I could use. Thanks to all of you.
Let’s start with Dani’s hat. She wanted a cloche-style hat.
Then it was almost right but she wanted to flatten and shrink the crown. So, using her head ( it is your best hat block) we worked with the rubbing tool to get the hat to where she wanted it. She did do some more rubbing herself.
This is the finished hat. You can see she used a different colour inside.
Next is Leanard. Leonard wanted a Robin Hood hat. this is a hat that perches on top of your head rather than fitting down around your head.
Here is the layout
And the finished hat. I say finished, but Leonard is going to work on shrinking the length more.
Next is Christine. She wanted an oversized beret.
The finished hat. I think she was happy with it. What do you think? LOL
now we have Luna who wanted a witch hat. She picked a great deep purple for it.
This hat was a big layout so it took a little longer from start to finish and we ran out of time. Luna took it home for the final shrinkage and fulling of the brim to stiffen it.
Lastly, we have the 2 I don’t seem to have taken any progress picture of.
Barb’s Cloche hat. She used some silk hankies to decorate her hat they won’t show up well until it’s dry.
And Susan’s folded brim hat. The turquoise was such a good colour for her.
All in all, it was a really fun class with great results.
This is a guest post by Charlotte P. of The Craft Council of Newfoundland and Labrador. I thought our readers would like to hear about this interesting conference being held in September. Thanks for writing the post Charlotte!
The Craft Council of Newfoundland and Labrador has the pleasure to announce the
Made in Canada: Sustainable Fibre Arts Conference 2024. The Conference is taking
place from September 19 to 23, 2024, in Gros Morne National Park, a UNESCO
World Heritage Site, in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.
Last held in 2015, our Fibre Conference brought presenters, participants, and visitors
from all across the globe together to discuss the exciting developments in the fibre arts.
While sustainability is far from a new concept, sustainable textile practices are evolving
and being adopted by hundreds of artists in Canada and across the globe. Focusing on
sustainability and respect for the land, water and air, this conference aims to discuss
sustainable and ecological craft practices and materials, and how sustainability can
support rural and urban craft communities and move forward in the craft industry. For
more information, please visit www.fibrearts2024.ca.
Among the workshops offered will be foraged plant fibre weaving, animal hide tanning,
papermaking with recycled textiles and flax fibre, and block printing with natural dye
mordants.
If you need a break from the hands-on activity, there will also be lectures and panel
discussions on sustainable animal fibre harvesting and processing, Indigenous fibre
systems, and other topics! Attendees will have the opportunity to connect with other
fibre artists during the conference’s meet & greet luncheon and cumulative artisan
market. For more information on the conference’s schedule of events, please visit https://www.fibrearts2024.ca/program.
Registration is open now until July 31, 2024, with special early bird pricing open until
March 31!
I am fairly open about my mental health issues. I have spent the last few years searching for something that makes me feel better. Just in my short time writing for FFS, I have showed you a plethora of things, I’ve tried. No one is more surprised than me, to find my zen in quilting: English Paper Piecing (EPP) to be exact.
You might be thinking – isn’t that the kind of quilting where you sew everything by hand? Yes, that’s the one. It turns out, our grandparents had this figured out, a long time ago. I say grandparents – male and female – because in my genealogy, the men were as deeply steeped as the women. I come from 5 generations of tailors and sewers, and they were equally adept with needle and thread.
As an adolescent, I enjoyed the slow stitching of needlepoint, but detested machine sewing. My machine sewing was never good enough, for my (evil?) home economics teacher, and I just wanted to get my assignments over with. That experience left me scarred. I would not touch a sewing machine, to save my life. (I recently signed up for a FFS machine embroidery class, with Ruth Lane, and barely made it past threading the machine.) It must be the slow process of hand stitching, that makes the difference for me.
My happiness hand quilting, and all of the positive things I’ve heard about this subject, were not a good enough reason for me to post about it. I needed to offer something solid to our readers. I did a search this morning to see what (if anything) I could find. It turns out this has been looked at, and there are some findings that make sense. This is where the word FLOW comes in to my discussion. On a podcast called “Conscience Chatter,” episode 297 talks with “Lizz Leral, the Executive Director of Quilting for Community.” https://consciouschatter.com/podcast/2023/6/6-episode-297-lizz-leral-quilting-for-community
She states “There’s this idea of being in the FLOW state, or this feeling of being entirely in the moment and hyper-focused, and in a sort of zone.” (Lizz) She says that in today’s rush, in everything we do, we have a difficult time finding the zone we need to refresh. She mentions, a book called Stolen Focus, and I am paraphrasing here… once we are in our stitching zone (or felting zone) and we are interrupted, it takes an average of 23 minutes to return to our zen state. She says, “Hand Oriented activities help transport us” to that special place. This is further backed up by Oxford University, Journal of Public Health, Volume 34, Issue 1, March 2012, Pages 54-59: “The relationship between quilting and wellbeing” https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdr041
So, I have been slow stitching crazy quilt hexagon flowers.
Close up of a hexagon flower block. One center hexagon, surrounded by a row of six hexagons.
I have been enjoying this slow/flow, stitching so much, I joined the Tales of Cloth, 2024 Ice Cream Soda Quilt Along. I started with a limited fabric collection, and quickly discovered my idea wasn’t going to work as planned. A little bit of FLOW made me discover, I can pivot in a different direction: everything will work out. Instead of perfection, I will allow my quilt to become what it needs to be. There is no rush on completion, it will take as long as it takes. It’s meant to be a learning process, and sometimes that takes a little time.
Block #1 – Ice Cream Soda Quilt. I started this project with a fabric series, from Ruby Star Society, called Sugar Cone.
I hope this post, encourages you to…let it flow, too.
For this quarter’s challenge I made a cover for my phone because it was embarrassed to be seen in its temporary cover – an old trainer sock.
I put down 4 fine layers of white merino wool then rolled it until it became very firm pre-felt. Inlays from a scrap project were placed on it to make the design for the front and back of the phone cover. I then rubbed the felt from the back, so as not to disturb the design too much, until it was fulled.
When it was dry I added wobbly stitching, cut the felt to size, then stitched the pieces together.
You may have noticed that there are only 9 finger-holes in the dialling ring instead of 10 and I’d like to say that it’s artistic licence but in reality I simply ran out of space!
I made a fabric lining …
… to complete the phone cover.
The cover will protect both the screen and camera lenses when the phone’s knocking around in my handbag 🙂
Ions ago, I purchased all the bits and pieces that I needed for acid dyeing. I never lost my enthusiasm for it (in principle!). I listened to my textile friends waxing lyrical about dyeing. If I am to be perfectly honest here, I lacked both the knowledge and the confidence to try it. So when I came across a dyeing course which was being run over the four Tuesdays in November, well, I didn’t have to think twice, I immediately booked it. The workshops were run by an Irish Textile Artist and all round nice person, Sharon Wells (https://www.sharonwellsart.com/). Sharon provided all the equipment and fibres but mentioned that we were free to bring along any fibres we wished to experiment with over the course of the workshop and of course our limitless curiosity!
Week 1:
During week 1 we worked with Jacquard Acid Dyes. Once Sharon explained the basics of what would and would not work with these dyes, she set us to work, initially teaching us how to secure hanks for the dye pot. We were each given our own pot to work with. Then we got down to the fun work of choosing dyes, testing fibres and dyeing.
Our first experiment was with solid colour. We each threw a variety of fibres into our respective pots and got to work. It was great fun watching as the colours developed. I had chosen orange for my first test and it was just so exciting watching the different hues develop. I have prepared short slideshows of the results of each of the experiments over the four weeks. Details of the fibres are included in the captions.
Kerry Mountain sheep – I carded the dyed sample which was a mistake as it blended all the lovely colours
Silk yarn which I bought in the Silk weaving shop on Granville Island Vancouver
Chunky woollen yarn, I don’t know the breed but I love the range of colour!
Locks again I love the way the dye has taken here
Three plant fibres. Not sure which is which but we have nettle, viscose and rose
This was given to me to tie my samples and I thought I would dye a sample. There’s definitely some wool in the yarn
Next, to some of my fellow participants horror, we saw Sharon cut into an old shrunk felted jumper. We were each given squares and shown how to randomly sprinkle the dye powder onto the surface. This time we used a minimum of 3 colours on the sample. Once prepared it was popped into the dye pot and other fibres were thrown in not to waste the dye that came off the sample. Here are my results.
Front view A cut off a felted jumper. We sprinkled various colours of dye powder on this before it went in the pot
Back view of the sample
Various locks: I love the way the colours took
Kerry mountain sheep breed: this time I did not card it so we can see it unblended!
Yarn: variety unknown
The chunky wool yarn which I threw into a different part of the pot
By this stage we were all getting really excited. This was like alchemy or as one of us said, witchcraft (which is possibly a more accurate description as we all gathered round one of the cauldrons (yes there was one, the rest were pots)) and saw the reactions of the different coloured dyes we were adding to the pot full of fibres. We were learning (among other things) how to control where the differed colour dye permeated the fibres and how the colours mixed throughout the process. Here’s what I produced.
Industrial prefelt I tie dyed it for a bit of fun. Gorgeous results!
Kerry mountain sheep. More exciting colours
Locks from the same pot
Front view: Silk fibre. I can’t help thinking about Hubble when I see this photo!
Back view of the silk fibre
Nettle: same pot
Front view: Merino 19 micron roving (tops). More Hubble vibes coming through here
Back view: Merino roving (tops)
Week 2:
It is amazing how disciplines have their own languages. Mordants; fugitive colours; substantive dyes – Sharon quickly demystified all the terminology – a real confidence boost – then she produced a vat of fibres which she had been seeping in the mordant for some days. She also gave us a variety of pots which we could work from. Then came the fun ‘show and tell’. Sharon had been growing and collecting various flowers and plants over the summer months. She dried these especially for the session so we each got one to work with. We had dried containers of marigolds, rose petals, sunflower petals, sunflower heads, and ground up nettle. I got the nettle to try. One of the participants opted for fresh eucalyptus. We set pulling the dye out of the plants, straining it and then to dyeing our fibres. Here’s our progress and the results:
A huge vat full of mordanted fibre Aluminium sulphate steeped for a few days in preparation for the course
The ground nettle which was dried over the summer
Dried roses, the dye produced a lovely perfume
Rose petals produced a really exciting pink colour dye
the lovely colour extracted from the sunflower heads
Here is the sunflower petal dye the final results were vibrant
The straining stage for one of the dyes (sorry can’t remember which one!)
Loki oversaw all work and every now and again figured his new friends should stop for play
Everyone’s finished work laid out in the sun to dry
Result from dyeing with the dried nettles. Not very exciting
The marigold petals produced a delicate creamy result which differed in shade depending on the fibre used
The gorgeous results from the dye extracted from the sunflower petals
Lovely shades of yellow from the Sunflower heads
The pink was lost during rinsing which was a bit disappointing
The fresh eucalyptus produced a delicate green/yellow result which differed in shade depending on the fibre used
Then as a further experiment we took dye from a couple of the dye baths and added different components to see how the dye reacted. We used tin, chrome copper and vinegar. The results were surprising.
Top is the rose dye middle L/R vinegar, tin, chrome, copper Bottom is the Sunflower petals
I was disappointed with the colour of the nettles which were a murky colour. Also the powder from the nettles made the fibre really grainy and unattractive. I thought I would see if I could use fresh nettles from the garden. Sharon had offered me some mordant to bring home for this experiment and like an idiot I forgot it. So, based on an earlier comment she had made during the class I decided to try using aluminium foil as a mordant. I steeped the fibre overnight and made up the dye which I strained. Then I dyed the fibre. The result is a beautiful soft green which I am very pleased with. I am not sure that the mordant took as only time will tell if the fibre loses its colour but it did not happen when I rinsed it. The grains from the original nettle powder were still scattered throughout the wool fibre so I took my carders to the Kerry sheep fibre. Although I have yet to be convinced that natural dye is an avenue I want to pursue further I really enjoyed the day and the learning.
A sample of the nettle dye from the fresh nettles
Overdyeing with the fresh nettle dye. I left it to cool in the dye pot overnight to give it the best chance
Result from dyeing with the dried nettles. Not very exciting
Final result with the fresh nettles lovely shades of green. photo taken before dyeing
The final result for the fresh nettle dye. I love the variety of tints!
I have so much to share from these four weeks that I will save weeks 3 and 4 for my next blog post. A million thanks to Sharon for facilitating such an interesting set of Tuesdays last November.
1.3 “Hair Brush Comb Cleaner Tool”
1.5 Small wire bristle brush used to hold down wisp of fibre as it is impaled by the felting needle (T-38-333, if you were curious)
1.6 the wires were catching loose bits of fibre but did hold down what I was working on.
1.7 Plastic bristle brush cleaner with flat wooden handle.
1.8 Clover brush cleaning tool
