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Felt Cuffs and Hats

Felt Cuffs and Hats

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My last post showed you some bubble samples I made when visiting my friend Maureen. This time I will show you what we did with them. The first thing we did was try some wrist cuffs. We both used the same colours. They were two scrap pieces of pre felt that Maureen had. We felted them together and down to 22 inches long. The bubbles will bring them to a good length for around your wrist.

   

I won’t show you all the steps of felting and putting the marbles in but as you can see it was done in the sun on the patio with a glass of wine. We are not all work and no play. In the right hand picture you can see the marble inside the bubble I just cut open.

  

Here they are on and in the right hand picture you can see we left one bubble uncut. It acts as the button to fasten the cuff around your wrist. We put a felt ball in that one.  That was a success so we decided to do hats.

  

Here you can see the resist and the size of the finished hat with the marbles in it. On the right is Maureen with hers on. They are still wet at this point. We ran them through her laundry spinner and they were dry in the sun in an hour.

  

By then we had eaten dinner and it was back out the deck for a glass of wine and cutting. Here we are wearing them and a close up of mine so you can see the cut bubbles better. I stretched the large bubble after I cut it open to really show off the contrasting colours.

We had a great couple of days together felting and enjoying the weather. I have to say her husband was great he did most of the cooking and all of the clean up.

Felt Bubbles

Felt Bubbles

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A while back I went to a felting friends for a few days fun.  She showed me how to make bubbles and cut them  open to great effect. Here are the pictures of what I did.

First of course I laid out some wool to felt. But these are samples so plain felt won’t do . I added silk threads and a silk square and some silk roving and other wools to see how it would all go. This is the underside.

This is what the top side looks like

Then of course there was the usual rolling and fulling.

rolling rolling rolling

Here they are all finished and ready for the marbles.

The next step is to put marbles in while it is still damp. You pull the felt tightly around the marble and secure it with an elastic and now it is a bubble. We used the elastics they use to put braids in horses tails and manes because they are small, stretchy,  strong and cheap.  You put in as many as you like and what ever sizes you like. You can also use felt balls. the felt balls are good if you want to leave them uncut. Marbles are to heavy for that.

Here they are all tied up.

Felt with marbles tied in to make bubbles

Here they are cut.  I cut the tops off , I cut x’s and star patterns and some I tuned inside out. if you cut more off you see more of the inside and you can stretch them flatter too.

Bubbles cut open

You can see how the underside becomes the inside of the bubbles. These samples started out about 6×8 inches and the finished pieces are about 1.5 by 2.5 inches. They take up a lot of room. I only have 2 of them left my friends dog ate one. I think I will glue them to some leather and make broaches out of them. They are lots of fun to do. I made some wrist cuffs with this method and I will blog about them next week.