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Felted Birdhouse Class

Felted Birdhouse Class

Hi everyone I am a day or two behind so please forgive the late post. On Sunday I had 3 ladies for a Felt Birdhouse class. There should have been 4 but one lady was sick. I hope she is feeling better now.

Here is the start, 2 gourd shapes and a circle.

Locks where very popular this class. Carlene ( blue ) brought lots her own and some threads as well. This is side one

side two after wetting

Healing the cut after making the hole to get the resist out and let the bird in.

And all finished. We used Corriedale wool and you can see the shrinkage, about 1.3. The brown took more work to shrink for some reason. I hadn’t had the colour make any difference before.

They got sent home with instructions to blow up a balloon or some scrunched up plastic bags inside to get it to dry in a nice round shape. Carlene posted some pictures of her birdhouse on facebook when it was dry.

You will notice there is a red lock missing at 4:00. So she has added one with some felting needles.  I think it turned out great.

Have you done any felting in preparation for springs arrival? We just had 15 cm of snow dropped on us and it is still snowing so thoughts of spring are all we have.

 

Pods and Cords

Pods and Cords

I’ve mentioned we’ve been exploring resists at the Well Being centre recently, and one of the group said she’d really like to make a round vessel, so I thought we’d follow rosiepink’s vessel tutorial. It turned out there was only 2 of us there early enough to have a go, so we’re doing it again this week, but this is mine:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAnd the other side:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI’ve been looking for ‘smoothing tools’ for vessels for years, like Lyn’s suggestions of a baby’s rattle or laundry liquid dispenser, I keep checking the baby section, and dog toy section, even the kitchen section for a ladel, but still haven’t found one! I did buy some foam for resists though and I thought I’d try it out and make a new birdpod. I remembered those coconut ones, and tried to do a similar shape. I didn’t get it quite right, but using lots of coarse wools did give it a hairy coconut look, though:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI need to make a cord for it to hang it up. Usually, I make cords from offcuts or make some handspun yarn and felt that, but I had an idea for some garden ornaments and thought I’d give it a go using a bamboo mat. I can’t remember which wool I used, I think it was something from Wollknoll labelled just ‘Scottish grey’. I had a hard time getting photos of all my things, it went too dark yesterday, so this morning I took them into the garden and tried them in a few places, when I put the first cord down on the paving stones it camouflaged itself, even the pattern seems to match!

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThat was just the test piece for the idea I wanted to try. The only trouble was, I needed a larger mat than a placemat. I looked at my living room blinds, just hanging there with a huge roll of unused bamboo sat at the bottom. I unrolled it and there must have been two feet of spare blind, so a few snips and a few tied ends later, I had a shorter window blind and a new rolling mat! This cord hasn’t completely dried yet, but I know I need to make the next one a bit thinner, and I think that will help it be firmer too, but it turned out a lot better than I expected:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAs usual, whenever I’m in the garden, I had a visitor, noseying from the background, poor little thing has no feet 🙁

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Birdhouse Class and Lambs.

Birdhouse Class and Lambs.

It is spring! Saturday I taught a Birdhouse Class.

Everyone had fun decorating their birdhouses.

Bernadette bird house 2

birdhouse 3 birdhouse 4

Of course there was rubbing and rolling and throwing

rubbing rolling

throwing

and everyone ended up with great looking birdhouses. Bernadette (second from the left) wanted a feeder so she made her opening much bigger.

birdhouses finishedThe other way I know that spring is here I we had our first lambs . We started with a bang, quadruplets. They are less than an hour old here, so not even cleaned up properly yet.

quad lams

and the reason my post is late this morning is because I have a visitor.

Fynn

 

 

Making Mini Birdhouses.

Making Mini Birdhouses.

I got an order for some mine birdhouses for decorations.

I laid out 3 at a time, I get both sides ready then put the resist in.

mini birdhouse layout

Once they are wet I add the decorations

pink mini birdhouse redy to felt pink and green ready to felt

The green dots were cut out of a piece of homemade prefelt. The pink stripe is just a long strip of top.

Here I used a piece of felt that was cut off something else before I started the shrinking. I have I bin of off cuts. This one was quite thick so I spit it then cut it up for the decoration.

docorating minibird house blue decorations

Here is a shot after felting. It shows the size and the shrinkage. The picture on the right  is  with a balloon in so it will dry in the right shape.

mini birdhouse size min birdhouse with balloon

They are getting there strings right now. If I can get them done and get a pictures of them I will edit it in. Otherwise you will have to wait for my next blog post.

 

 

 

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