angora – Felting and Fiber Studio

Finished Texture Piece

February 9, 2013 zedster66 Comments 13 comments

I mentioned in my last post that I’d finished my white texture piece that I’ve talked about recently. Here is the photo from the last post of it all sewn up. I finally managed to get a bright enough day to take a photograph. With all of the locks it’s really quite big, so I had to take it outside and photograph it on a large piece of cardboard. It’s roughly 16 inches x 11 inches, but the locks at the bottom are almost 11 inches long.

I wanted to try something different, so when I laid it out I left a space in the centre without any wool then added a piece of cotton gauze after the second layer of wool. It was here that I added the wool locks around the edges as well. I then added another two layers of wool. The surface texture around the edge of the gauze is soybean top, a piece of cotton gauze and silk noil.

In this close-up, you can see a few wisps of wool have crept behind the gauze.

The wool locks all kept their shape really well and none of them tangled together. The Angora, Wensleydale and Teeswater locks in this next photo show how nicely they turned out.

I kept the whole texture piece soft and spongey by using wools like English 56s, Swaledale, Texel and Cheviot. For surface texture I used cotton gauze, scoured Bluefaced Leicester and Wensleydale as seen in this photo.

I also used Mohair, wool nepps, raw Gotland, Teeswater and Wensleydale locks, and embellishment fibres soybean top and silk noil.

I’m really pleased with the way it turned out, especially the gauze panel in the centre. Doing this piece has given me some good ideas for future projects.

January Projects

January 25, 2013 zedster66 Comments 14 comments

I’ve been trying to find ways of having a few projects on the go so I can work on them for a few minutes at a time where possible. A few months ago, I posted about a couple of felt pieces I’d made with the intention of practising stitches for the Take A Stitch Tuesday challenge. I didn’t keep up with the challenge, so had the pieces spare. I decided to add some stitching to the first piece. This is how it looked originally. I started by machine stitching around the patches of colour.

This is a close up:

Over the next couple of days, I added some hand stitched straight stitches, first in in yellow and then added some in orange.

Another project I got started on this week is a white texture felt piece. Liz from That Fuzzy Feeling blog, recently made a gorgeous piece of texture felt and it inspired me to make one. I decided to make a natural white one, so I got to play with (and smell!) my collection of wool, alpaca and mohair locks. They are mostly unwashed so my hands felt really nice afterwards.

The first day I managed to get as far as laying it out and sewing up around the edges.

Here are some of the gorgeous locks I positioned around the edges:

So far, I’ve managed to add the stitches from the top to the bottom.

Thanks to Ruth for encouraging us to find ways to fit in a few minutes of fibre time each day, I’ve managed to get a lot more done this week than I otherwise would have. It might not be much each day, but before long, it all adds up to finished projects I wouldn’t have had without the challenge 🙂

Felt Birdpods and natural wool

March 23, 2012 zedster66 Comments 14 comments

I really liked the way my first bird pod turned out last week, so I decided to make a couple more. I recently got some dark brown Corriedale and thought it wold be nice to try one with that. Like the first one, I started off with a couple of layers of Merino, natural brown this time, and again added the locks before the top two layers of Corriedale. I added some washed Gotland fleece and some bamboo fibre to the top for extra interest and really liked how it turned out. The bamboo started to look ‘rusty’ in places. I gave this to my mum today and she really liked it.

The last pod I made was an all white one for my girlfriend. I made this a little larger because I wanted to use extra locks. I started this one with two layers of English 56s. The locks I used were Teeswater, Mohair and older Angora goat locks. Teeswater locks are really long, some of the ones I had were 15 or 16 inches, I used those across the top to come out at both sides. The top two layers were merino 64s, then for extra texture I added some combed teeswater tops, Angora and Mohair locks, some very crimpy Bluefaced Leicester, and some carded bamboo fibre. Even if we never get birds nesting in these, they’ll look good with the locks swaying in the wind 🙂

Staying with the ‘natural’ theme, one of my other natural wool and fibre combinations I tried recently was grey Norwegian tops and Milk protein fibre. I liked the way the crimp and wave of the Norwegian wool appeared after felting, it really gave it an interesting texture. And the way it pulled on the milk protein fibre, which was already waving from being pulled by the shrinking felt, gave that an interesting texture too, and made it more rippley. I really like the way those two worked together. I’d be interested in any of your favourite wool and fibre combinations.