Here’s a few links we thought you might enjoy.
http://kirstenhouseknecht.blogspot.ca/2013/03/nuno-felted-kimono-project.html
This link has some fiber related tutorials but so much more that is interesting. http://www.howtohistory.com/video-tutorials/
http://www.fibermixedmedia.com/
Michelle Mischkulnig’s Fiber Art
Kathleen Vance’s Traveling Landscapes
http://www.doilyfreezone.com/premysl-knap-4/
Ann Wood’s Bloomer, Bloomer and Bloomer
Bird houses are moving along. After I cut the holes I rolled them a little I put them in to some pantyhose tops for a trip through the dryer to get some of the fulling done.
They have balloons inside them.
They tumble for about 20 minuets without any heat. Then it’s back to hand fulling to finish them. I did some with merino and some with romney. Here you can see the shrinkage difference between the wool. The merino ones are on top.
Next is they get rinsed and more balloons inside to get them to dry the right shape.
You will notice that the green ones are not in this picture, this is why:
This is their 10th soak so the next step is to boil them to see if that stops the bleeding.
I will do the finishing work on the bird houses this weekend. Why is the finishing always the hardest part. I will add the hanging sting and hang them up for one final picture for you.
Spring is on the way and its time to start thinking about birdhouses. I have an Easter show. Not much in the way of felt really sells at this sale, it’s mostly about food. Bird houses are the exception. Here they are ready to put to the decorations on and then be put together for felting.
This one has its decorations started
That is as far as I made it. they have been sitting there for most of the week waiting for me to get back to them. I have hopes for this weekend and when they are done I will show them to you.
the wool I used I died myself. It is sold as washed gray Romney but it is really brown and white. If you card it without dying it, it does end up looking gray.
Here is what it looks like if you dye magenta, purple and chartreuse.
I love the way the “gray” wools dyes. all the mixed shades you end up with. A spinner friend says its called depth of colour, so it’s not flat. I wish I could find other breads of wool that were that varied in colour to dye.
The Winner of the Beyond Nuno Giveaway is … Wendy who commented on February 25th. Congratulations, Wendy 🙂 Please will you leave a comment on this post so I can email you with the download details, Thanks 🙂 Thanks a lot for entering and for leaving such nice comments, everyone 🙂
We’ve had a lot of new visitors to the Studio site recently, and lots of new members on the forum, so I thought it might be time to do a reminder about everything we have to offer here on the Studio site. Before we started the blog just over a year ago, the four of us spent about 6 weeks working on the site, filling it with as much info as we could. We wanted to build the site into a valuable ‘One-Stop’ resource for anyone interested in felting and fibre.
The ‘About Us’ page tells you a little bit about why we started the Studio site, and there are sub pages for each of us with some info about ourselves and our interests.
In the Felting section there’s a short introduction about the many different kinds of felting. The main pages for Machine, Needle, Nuno and Wet felting all have more in-depth information, and each has a gallery page with many different examples of that particular type of felting.
Mixed media simply means artwork that is made with more than one medium, but for the purpose of the site we use it to mean artwork made mainly with felt or fabric combined with other materials. This section features pages about Beads and Beading, Hand Stitching, Machine Stitching and Surface Design. Each page’s gallery features many examples of artwork.
The Fibers section is packed full of information about wool and other animal fibres. The main Fibers page explains some of the different terms that are used to describe wool in its various stages of processing. The Wool and Other Animal Fibers page has a lot of information about wool, animal fibres from animals such as Alpaca, Angora goat, Llama and Camel. There is also an explanation of the Micron and Bradford Count systems of measuring a fibre’s fineness or coarseness; and a PDF guide to the most common sheep breeds and their Bradford and Micron numbers. The gallery page features photos of different animal fibres. Preparing Fibers has a guide to processing your own wool, from washing a raw fleece to carding it into fluffy batts ready for felting or spinning. There is a photo set and detailed description.
The Other Fibers section has lots of information about the non animal fibres we commonly use in felting, such as silk and organza fabrics; fibre prepared into tops like bamboo, banana, viscose, and the more unusual fibres like crimped nylon, plastic and Angelina fibres.
The Silk page shows the many different silk products available, for example, silk carrier rods, silk hankies and silk throwster’s waste and the gallery page features many uses of these. The Man-made fibers page and its gallery have examples of fibres and their uses including commercial art yarns and some nuno felt examples with synthetic fabrics. The Plant Based Fibers page has many examples of these gorgeous luxurious fibres and felted pieces using them.
The Tutorials section is another area with a wealth of information. There are free Dyeing, Felting, Fiber preparation and Mixed media tutorials all written by one of us, including a video on how to make your own roving using a diz, PDFs on Degumming silk and dyeing it; Stitching on felt, making mixed media wall art, using a sander for wet-felting, a beginners guide to using a drop spindle and dyeing with food colouring.
And if you can’t find what you want there, there are also links to outside sites in the Links/Resources section, including rosiepink’s free felting tutorials and their fantastic e-book showing how to make amazing felt artwork and Ruth’s book The Complete Photo Guide To Felting.
So, make yourself comfortable and come and have a look around the site. We’re always happy to read comments and listen to suggestions for adding more to the site, or to requests for articles or tutorials. Maybe you are a fibre artist with an interesting skill that would make a great feature or you’d like us to link to a tutorial, if you have anything felt or fibre related you want to tell us about, we’d love to hear about it 🙂
http://www.peaceindustry.com/page.php
Recycled Knits and Fabrics combined with Felt Scarf by Sassafras Design
Heather’s Red and Yellow Scarves
http://mjuliarossi.blogspot.ca/
Have you been following Liz’s journey with her students for Holocaust Memorial Day?
http://www.feltinhand.com/gallery.htm
http://woollove-functional-fiberart.blogspot.ca/2013/01/under-big-top-scarf-part-1-of-2.html
http://www.wendyfeldberg.ca/galleries.html
Simple Directions for Covering a Lamp Shade with Felt
Acrylic Leaf Printing for your Art Journal Pages
Shrunken Books Tutorial from Maggie Grey
http://cornit-felt.blogspot.ca/2012/06/about-our-roses.html
http://wendyfe.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/eco-prints-to-start-the-year/
Over on the felt and fiber forum we had a holiday exchange. This is the wonderful gift I got From Teri Ann.
He is expertly needle felted and the wool in all naturally dyed. the wool was dyed using indigo,cochineal, Barberry twigs and cleavers roots. He will have pride of place when the decorations go up.
this is a short post as I haven’t had any time for felting the last little while. I was getting ready for the North Gower Farmers’ Market Christmas Sale December 1. that meant lots of baking. I made steak and Guinness pies, lamb and vegetable pies and tourtieres. My mom made steak and mushroom and steak and kidney pies. we sold 60 large and 35 small pies. I also made scones and dog and cat treats My husband also backed lots of bread, my daughter made muffins. It was a long day but we enjoyed seeing everyone from the summer market and the new faces too.
This was taken about half way through the day. The bags at the end are sold pies waiting to be picked up after people finish their shopping.
In the spring I made some shrug jackets using a pattern I saw in a book about making simple garments with your weaving. I don’t weave but I can felt a rectangle instead of weaving it. You would think that I would read what to do instead of just going from memory but that would have been too easy. I made some nice looking shrugs.
They look nice enough but they didn’t really fit as well as I would have liked. They were to puffy at the back so not very flattering. I think the problem is the rectangle they are made from was to wide making the shrug to long. I decided to change them. I unpicked them and gave them a wash to get rid of all the thread holes.
I folded the top down about 1/3 to create a kimono sleeve. You end up with something that is more like a shawl that doesn’t fall off as you use you hands and go about your day.
If you would like a larger collar you can wear it the other way up.
You could also just sew a line down the edge or just the other direction to have a larger sleeve opening. I like these much better. I hope other people like them too. I am going to my guild exhibition and sale this weekend and I will have them there. On that note if you are in Ottawa this weekend Drop by the Glebe Community Center to see what we are up to.
Dyeing some waste. Throwsters waste that is and I suppose it must have been trash at some point or they wouldn’t call it that. Throwing is was they call reeling silk for thread and this is the left over little bits. I have a batch of white and needed some colours for a project. The pictures of wet silk an bags did not turn out but I have some nice pictures of the end.
I dyed small amounts in plastic sandwich bags. First I placed each blob of waste in a bag and added some soapy water to get it wet. I let it sit to soak while I got the dye ready. I used MX dye as it would be the fastest and easiest. I poured of the extra water out then poured in the dye, just enough to get it all wet. I squished it around in the bag to make sure it all got dye. No worries about felting the silk, a nice change from dyeing wool. I did the same for all the colours and let them sit for 10 min. I added a solution of PH up and water. Buying the pool chemical is the cheapest way to buy Sodium Carbonate, especially at the end of the season.
I made a solution and poured in enough to cover the silk. I let it sit for about half an hour then drained and rinsed the silk. Here is what it looks like drying on my front porch.
Not so great looking. I had squeezed all the extra water out of them. However after they were dry I fluffed them up and they look like this.
As you can see fluffed up they barely fit on the same drying rack in 2 batches. My project didn’t work out, the waste I used on the surface sank into the courser wool I was using and disappeared so I have nothing to show you right now. I am planing to use some more on hats so I will do a post with them later.
I know you’ve all been waiting on pins and needles to see who won the book give away for The Complete Photo Guide to Felting. I used a random number generator. There were 58 entries and the number chosen was 49. That number corresponded to Linda Whitmore’s comment. Linda, please e-mail me your snail mail address to info at purplepomegranate dot com (I spelled it all out to avoid spammers, but write it like a regular e-mail address). Linda, I need to hear from you within 48 hours. If I haven’t gotten your response by that time, I will re-draw for another winner. I want to get the book in the mail to you by Monday at the latest. Thanks to everyone who entered the give away. I wish I had 58 books to give away so each of you could have one. It’s nice to hear from everyone, I hope you’ll comment on our regular posts more often too. 🙂
And just to make this post a bit more interesting, I have included some fun stuff I’ve found around the web in the last couple of weeks.
Tutorial for adding eyes and ears (needle felting) by krex
Information from Diane about Wool Moths
GalaFilc’s Sunflower Scarf and Bag
Bure Bure’s Felt Derby Style Shoes
Just a quit little post to show you the sheep I have been working on for my Christmas sales. They do stand up so you can use them as a decoration but they will all have a pin on one side so you can wear them.
They are made with a combination of wet felting and needle felting. The ears are cut from a wet felted piece of fabric and I wet felt the snakes I cut for the legs. The body and head are needle felted. The ears, eyes and all the curls are added with needle felting. I hand dyed the curls. They are Border Leicester or Blue Faced Leicester I can’t remember.