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Just For Fun

Just For Fun

Comments 16 comments

It’s been quite a while since I made a piece of felt just for the fun of it. And quite a while since I made a piece of felt without worrying about even layers, straight edges, nice corners etc 🙂  So it was a lot of fun making this piece of green felt. I got out all my greeny shades of wool, fabric and fibres and started laying it out.

I started with two plain layers of merino tops, then added a third layer of lots of different greeny shades of merino blended with fibres like plastic, viscose, silk, banana and bamboo. Then I started adding all the other fibres, fabrics and yarns. I unravelled some fancy fibres I had in green, yellow and blue shades.

I used fabrics like organza, silk, tulle and a few shades of cotton gauze

There were a few sparkly bits

And lots of shiny bits too 🙂

What have you been working on just for fun lately?

Online Suppliers

Online Suppliers

Comments 36 comments

Do you buy fibres, wool or other felting supplies online? Could you spare a minute or two to tell me your favourite places to buy supplies online and what your most commonly bought items are? I’d also like to know what fibres you would like to try that you haven’t yet. For a long time, I’ve been planning to do a blog post comparing the prices of online suppliers. I’d like to choose one main supplier each from Australia, Canada, UK and USA, then compare the prices for a few commonly bought felting supplies and the shipping costs to each of the same countries.

I know everyone would like to support their local communities and small businesses, but with the current economic situation, we also like to save as much money as we can wherever possible. I know too, that for a lot of us, we just don’t have local shops that sell fibre supplies or nearby farmer’s markets, or there are other reasons which make buying online a necessity.

I’m hoping that by being more informed about the costs of supplies online, we can find the best places to buy from. Hopefully, it will make a wider variety of fibres more affordable and accessible.

I think it will really help new felters too, it can be overwhelming searching for online suppliers and trying to compare prices in different currencies and a variety of weights.

I’d also like to post about any bargains or exceptional quality wools or fibres, so if you have a favourite seller/supplier who you think deserves being more widely known, I’d love to know about these too. They don’t have to have a huge range of items, just something of great quality and great value for money.

Thanks a lot for your help and input 🙂

More Natural Wools and Fibres

More Natural Wools and Fibres

Comments 10 comments

Another couple of natural wool and natural fibre combinations I’ve used recently are Oatmeal Bluefaced Leicester with Ingeo top, and Humbug Jacob Tops with black and white Bamboo tops.

Humbug Jacob tops are a stripey blend of black and white Jacob wool tops. Just on its own it produces a nice result, but I thought I’d try using strips of black and white bamboo tops for effect. Both bamboos are really soft, white bamboo looks silky, but black bamboo is fluffy and more like fluffy cat fur. They felt quite differently too, the white keeps its silkiness and shines really nicely, and the black almost fades into the background, staying very matt.

Ingeo is made from corn, it is soft and shiny and smells faintly of caramel 🙂 I decided to cover the whole piece with Ingeo as it has such a lovely sheen. This was another fibre which shone even in dim light. The effect after drying is gorgeous, Ingeo is such a nice silky fibre and went really well with the Oatmeal Bluefaced Leicester. I think this combination would make a lovely soft and shiny scarf.

Bamboo Leaves

Bamboo Leaves

Comments 8 comments

I was having a look round my garden last week to see if I could find things to felt with. One of the things I tried was dried bamboo leaves. I did a small sample with 3 leaves between 2 thin layers of 23 mic Merino, and was quite pleased with how it turned out. This morning, bored to tears by Christmas telly, I got my sewing machine out and did some simple stitching on the sample. I think it took longer to get the machine set up and put away than it did to sew, but it killed some time and I liked how it turned out 🙂