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Felted Vessel Workshop

Felted Vessel Workshop

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A few weeks ago, I taught a felted vessel class. A lovely bunch of ladies full of enthusiasm. As usual, I didn’t take as many pictures as I wanted, but here you can see the setup.

After everyone had their base ready, people got to work on embellishments. This is the hardest part, but also the most fun for most people. So many choices of wool and silk. They have to think about where they will cut their felt to take the resist out, to open it up, how big they want the opening and whether they want a very round pot or a flattish one. Where is the top, and where is the bottom?

I didn’t take as many pictures as I wanted to,  so we jump to the end.

Two ladies decided to cut slits and make their vessels into small bags. They need to work on the edges some more.

And one lady decided to turn hers into two small bowls. One was turned inside out so you can see the pattern better.

 

All in all, I think they did very well having never felted before, I don’t think any of them had ever handled fibre before.

 

New Vessels

New Vessels

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We decided to make ‘coiled pots’ at the Well Being centre yesterday. At first we were going to coil pencil roving waste around a resist, but thinking about how fiddly that would be, we decided to do a coil on each side of a template. We made really rough resists:

This is the Pencil Roving waste we used:

We put some silk threads onto the resist first. This is mine:

This is Cath’s:

Then started our coils. I chose to do mine directly onto the resist:

Cath decided to make a coil first:

This is how my first side looked:

And Cath’s first side:

We added wisps of wool:

Then two layers of wool. I used some broken Merino tops:

Cath used a grey blend, unknown from Botany lap waste:

This is the coil on my 2nd side:

And with the wisps from the other side folded over:

This is mine with the wisps from the 2nd side folded over. We added 2 more layers each side

Here’s an action shot of Cath felting hers:

This is mine after I started to felt it:

This is Caths when she’d cut the opening and turned the bowl the right way out:

This is mine after I cut the opening:

Cath cut into her vessel opening:

I didn’t get chance to finish mine, but this is how I looked on the bottom just before I rinsed it to bring home:

I will show the finished vessel next time.

Pots within pots

Pots within pots

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Just lately on Facebook everyone seems to be doing pots within pots so I thought I would give it a try.

The first post I did was just a simple round ball type pot. This is the first side. I didn’t crop the picture because the only picture I have of the second pots resist. It can be seen in the background at the top.

Then this is side 2. The yellow is done and the green about to be done.

The idea is you cut holes in the green one.  Then when you are done fulling,  you push the yellow one inside the green one and you will see it through the holes. Side 1 has quite small holes and side two has the bigger ones. You need at least one hole big enough to pull the resist out. Sorry for the not so good Pictures. I did take some with my new camera but I am still trying to figure out how to sink it to my phone with Bluetooth so I can get it onto the computer. I should be able to use a USB cord to my computer but I have to buy the cord.

Here they are with light inside. My cheap fake tea light was pathetic in the amount of light it gave off so I popped in a LED flashlight.

I did a second pot that I quite like. I put some silk hanky onto the resist and then added the wool for the inside pot.

And lit up.

The first 2 are a success. The third was not a success. My idea was to make a cone as a night light. I thought to make the inside one smaller so you could have some holes with nothing behind them. It was a disaster. I could see it was not going to work quite early in the process. So I did not really take much care with making nice holes.

It looks like a demented gnome hat.  There are 2 main problems. One is that I couldn’t figure out how to block the bigger one without squashing the smaller one. The other problem was that I would making something with a round base but when you do that with a flat resist you make the bottom edge curved so when you open it up it is flat. There was no way to do that with the double resist. I did try to stretch the middle bottom to make it longer but I just deformed other parts. I think next time I will try for a pyramid with a book resist. I have some other interesting ideas to experiment with too. The problem with pots is they do not seem to sell well and I only need so many decorative pots. its not as fun to play if you think you are just going to toss it in a box when your done.