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Felted Cat Cave, A Quick How To

Felted Cat Cave, A Quick How To

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Another old post from me. This is one of the most visited posts we have, so thought everyone might like to see it again.

I have been wanted to make a cat cave for sometime now. I decided it needed to be bright. I picked some Blue Faced Leicester  wool so it would be strong and dyed it chartreuse. Then I picked some purple and magenta for the spikes.

Spikes and Wool

I wanted an oval cat cave. I used my oval hat form to get the shape and gradually sized it up.

Drawing the Resist

I laid out 4 layers of wool for strength and even shrinkage. I put the first side aside and after laying out the second side I poked holes to put the spikes through.

Spikes in the Wool

After wetting it all down I wrapped each spike in plastic wrap so it would not get felted down flat.

Spikes all Wrapped Up

I covered it with a sheer curtain and rubbed both sides for a while and rolled it for a while and then wrapped it up and put it in the dryer twice, changing the position of the felt each time.  It was starting to shrink so I cut out the resist and switched to rolling it in a stick blind. I find the stick blinds to be very aggressive and shrinks felt quickly.  I did do some throwing too. Finally I rinsed the cave out in a bucket of alternately hot and cold water being quite aggressive with it. I then had to stretch the top so it would be domed up. I steamed it to heat it up and make it easier to stretch. Mostly I used a wooden spoon to push in a sliding motion to get the shape. Here it is on top of the resist so you can see how much it shrank.

Finished Cave on top of the Resist

Here it is in use, it didn’t take long for one of my cats, Wu, to take up residence.

 

Cat in Cave

As a foot note Wu ( queen of all things) is no longer with us. This is one of my favourite pictures of her. She really like the cave and we buried her in it, here on the farm.

What To Do With All The Little Bits Or Fun Batts

What To Do With All The Little Bits Or Fun Batts

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I am very busy getting ready for the first Farmers market of the season and forgot it was my turn to make a blog post. I thought You might like to see this one from 2012 again.

Ann

Last week I sorted out my wool and put all the decent size pieces on the new shelves. this left me with a lot of little bits. I usually keep bins of little bits to use as accents. Now I had way to much of that too.  I sorted it all, picked out the stuff I really wanted to keep and put the rest into 4 piles for carding.

I have a large carder, a Patrick Green Cottage Industry Carder.

A friend came over and we carded it into a 4 fun textured batts.

pink/red/purple batt
orange/yellow batt
brown/gray/black/white batt
blue/green batt

The batts came out really nice and will be great for felting or for spinning textured yarn. I didn’t think I had that much until we fluffed it up to card. It is amazing how much you can compress wool when you’re stuffing it into a little storage box.

Finishing and Framing

Finishing and Framing

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 Our Guest Artist today is Tracey Thompson who has several galleries interested in her work and offered to share some tips on finishing and framing with us.

So, you have created your latest pictorial masterpiece and now you have to decide how you wish to display it.  Here are a few options that I have tried, I am sure there are more.

Canvas

Deep or shallow edge canvases are very useful and can be used in a number of ways.  One suggestion is to make the piece big enough to stretch right over the sides and onto the back, then staple gun the edges of the felt to the wooden structure. Here is my 8×8 canvas example.

Then to tidy up the back I cut a piece of calico to size, ironed a neat hem and sewed it carefully to the back covering all the ugly staples, then added a D ring for hanging.

Another way to use canvas for displaying your work is simply to stick strips of double sided sticky tape onto the canvas and press your work onto the tape, this is useful if you want an organic look rather than a straight edge.

The last canvas tip I have is to again use tape to stick your piece to the canvas but this time, the work is slightly bigger than the canvas, so this creates the illusion that your art is ‘floating’ just off the wall.

 

Framing

Obviously your pieces can be framed, including a mount and glass. This is how I finish my pieces, choosing the correct colour mount to compliment the work, and using white wooden frames.

Another way of framing is to tape the piece to a complimentary coloured mount board and display it organically within the frame.

The last method I want to show you is a backing for a wall hanging.  Once the piece is finished, size a piece of calico for the back similar to the canvas above, and sew as before.  Then machine sew a strip of velcro (the fuzzy part) to the top of the work. Cut a slim baton and to this the loop section of the velcro is glued, and a D ring screwed midway for hanging.

The piece now has options available to yourself or the customer.  It can be hung as it is, using the D ring, or the baton can be taken off and the piece can be framed organically or with a mount as desired.

I hope that has given you a few ideas as to how you can show your work to its best advantage.

Thanks Tracey for these great framing tips!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Holiday Card and a Look Back and Ahead

A Holiday Card and a Look Back and Ahead

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I have been to busy lately to do any felting. The other problem is my felting table gets turned into gift wrapping central.

I Got a lovely card from my exchange partner in our card exchange. I got a few extra goodies with my card too. My partner Rhoda Lamb (how’s that for an appropriate name) has a nice little etsy store. https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/TheFibreBin?ref=search_shop_redirect

This year seems to have flown by. I have been teaching and making some art pieces for the guild art show celebrating Canadas 150th birthday. I even sold a piece, the sheep.

  

 

I had fun reshaping some hats. I plan to make some more that are similar.

 

 

Next year I would like to work more on artwork. Time to dig into the inspiration file. I have accumulated lots of frames I think will work well for felt. I will need to remember to make the pieces the size to fit and not make some felt and then try to find a frame that will work. The first thing to do will be to have a really good tidy up. With today being boxing day you wild think I might be inspired.

I am hoping for a slower and more creative new year and I wish you the same.

Ann

New Felted Hat in Progress

New Felted Hat in Progress

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If you are on the forum you may have seen the resist for this hat in the daily dose of fiber thread for this month. daily-dose-fiber-october-2017

I used wool in 3 layers because I wanted most of the shrinkage to be around. I wanted some height to play with.

After I cut it open I worked the edges and the rest as normal but near the end I also cut the top part of the right hand curled brim. I worked those edges to get them sealed. the rinsed all the soap out and let it dry because I was out of time for a few days. Today I finally got some time to work on it some more. I wet it all down and popped it onto a regular hat block and twisted the two long cut pieces around each other and then curled the ends around some tiny “pool noodles” I over exposed the picture trying to get the twist to show but the wool is just to dark.

Then I put in two sloped folds and pinned them with the little double pins. I found them after spending half an hour trying to fined my T pins that I gave up on finding. I am sure they are somewhere that was logical at the time but isn’t any more. I am not sure how that happens but it happens to me all the time.

It is now drying. The hat is sitting on another flat toped hat block and the pop bottle is holding the rim up so it dries in a better position.

When it is all dry I will take a picture of it again and show it to you.

Have you been working on any new designs lately?

 

Fibrefest.

Fibrefest.

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This last weekend was Fiberfest. I was a vendor. Set up was Friday afternoon and the sale was Saturday and Sunday. It was a good sale and I didn’t take a lot of pictures.  Here are the few I took of my booth.

You can see my new table drape with my name. I should have got a better picture of it.  I always forget when I am busy.

Here are some pictures of some of the new scarves in progress. I had planned on taking more pictures especially finished ones but I ended up in a rush to get done and packed.

This is some softsilk.  I got a small bag at another fiber festival. When I looked at it on line it looks like the silk sari threads. I think it may be but it has been shredded finer. It is very soft as the name implies.

After set up I went home to make tarts for the farmers market on Saturday morning, Strawberry and Blueberry.

My husband son and Mom will be going while I am at Fibrefest.

It was a busy but fun weekend

 

Finished Book Cover

Finished Book Cover

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I finished my book cover.

This is the piece I cut off the end for the one of the inside sleeves. When I used a piece of prefelt for the middle I hadn’t thought of it showing when I cut it. I think next time I would make a separate piece.

Here it is open with the book in it. Don’t look to closely at the stitching. The edge should be zig zaged but my machine will not longer zig zag.

and a close up of the pencil holder

Next time this will go on the outside maybe with a flap over it. It doesn’t allow the book cover to close flat.

This part I thought was quite good. I only sewed the flap down top and bottom so the book cover can slide right through. It makes it easy to insert the book and it means if the next book is a little bigger it will still fit.

and all closed up

The rope could be a little longer but it will work. Over all I like it but I know what I would do differently now. Have you made something for the first time lately?

A Zed Inspired Book Cover

A Zed Inspired Book Cover

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I bought myself a new sketch pad that is in a book form rather then a flip pad. I decided I wanted to cover it in the way that Zed had last shown us here project-updates-2/

I am lazy and wanted to get to the decorating so I started with a piece of white prefelt. I didn’t take a picture of it but you can see it in the picture of attaching the cord farther down. This is the overall piece just wet down.

Here is a closer look at the flowers and the little resist I put in for a pocket. I want to be able to put a pencil eraser nd pencil sharpener in the cover. I used some of my handspun for the stems.

The area with the pocket will be cut off and sewn in to make the sleeve on one side of the book cover.

I flipped it over and started to layout the purple for the inside when I realised I hadn’t added the cord yet.

I made a hole and stuck it in.

Then I decorated the inside of the flap. I am not sure how this will work out but we will see.

Now all I have to do is find time to do the felting and sewing. Not sure where half the summer has gone already. How much felting have you done this summer?

Latest Nuno and Bookcover

Latest Nuno and Bookcover

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I made the last of my nuno strip pieces into panels for a bag. It was this yellow piece:

I used various types of fabric–cotton, viscose, silk, suspected silk, so got various textures:

I liked these two strips next to each other, they showed the very different way felting/shrinkage affected them:

I used some of the spare offcuts from the orange piece to make up the panels:

I made the Green felt which I piled with BFL locks into a notebook/diary cover. The pictures look a bit weird because I had a small patch of desk out of the sunlight when I was taking photos, but it must have been shadier at one end so, to me, they look upside down!

Here’s the other side:

This is the inside without the book:

And this is the outside without the book:

I’ve finally got the buttons and buttonholes on nearly all the purses from a few weeks ago, so hopefully, I’ll have those to show next time 🙂

A Glimpse of Free Motion Class Projects

A Glimpse of Free Motion Class Projects

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I took Ruth’s Free Motion Stitching on Felt class in March. While I have done some free motion before,  it was good for me to stay on task to practice and learn some more about it.  We covered the basics of the machine, moving the fabric, supplies and set up.

At first we practiced a lot of lines, loops and circles to get used to moving the fabric and felt around under the needle.  I definitely needed a lot of practice.

The first piece of felt I practiced on to create dimension was a sample I had done a while back using some scraps of silk paper. If you look closely you can see circles.  However, the felt was just a bit too thick to create too much dimension.

Here is the sample of machine lace I did.  I used a flower pattern which turned out to be too open.   It looked better before I felted it. It’s laying on a piece of paper, but if I were to hold it up to the light it would look like a window.

I did more of the thread sketching and started to feel more comfortable and confident.

Here is  some coral in the water.

My Bird of Paradise.  Here I filled in the back of the leaf where it turned over, but I didn’t like it so I tore out the filling which isn’t fun in felt.

I probably should have just made the leaf whole.

Cathy (Luvswool) had given me some of her felt scraps and I really liked this red piece. (Thanks!) I debated what I could put on it to make use of the red.  Then I decided on a bare tree and some  stones and birds.  I call it Red Dawn.

I used metallic thread on the stones because I felt if they were dewy they would probably reflect differently in the red dawn.

I haven’t finished my final project, but will share that when I do.  It was a great class and it helped me gain confidence and skill.  I still need more practice but feel I made progress.