Felting and Fiber Studio

My online class Printing, Stenciling, and Playing with Thickened Dyes on Felt is coming up quickly. The class starts on September 16th. If you haven’t signed up yet, there is still time to sign up by September 13th. Thanks to everyone who shared my last post about the class in hopes of winning a free class spot. I had the computer pick a random number and the winner is:

Debra Pearce

Debra, I will contact you with further information about the class by Monday, September 12th. Congratulations! For those of you who didn’t win, there are still a spots available in the class if you would like to join us. Register here.

I finally got some time to work on the Third Quarter Challenge. I had decided that I wanted to try some silk flowers nuno felted to the surface to create dimension. I also wanted to add some other dimensional felting techniques to the piece.

I started with a large piece of white pre-felt and covered it with hand dyed 8mm habotai silk on the bottom third and hand dyed cheesecloth on the top two-thirds. Then I decided that I wanted to add some dimension with leaves under the cheesecloth. So I cut up a leaf printed wool blanket that I had printed with iris leaves. I just cut around the printed shapes and placed the leaves under the cheesecloth. I decided to use some black burlap for the vase. The nice people from BurlapFabric.com sent me some samples of their burlap and I decided to try it out with this project.  I will be writing another post soon about the burlap and how I have used the variety of burlap that they sent me. This used only one small piece.

I hadn’t ever made silk nuno felted flowers before so I just winged it. I folded and wrapped the hand dyed 5 mm habotai silk and then added a few stitches with cotton thread to hold it together. I made the flowers different sizes and different shapes to give them some contrast.  I added some similar colored merino wool under and in between the layers of the silk flowers to “glue” them down.

To add some variety and a bit of contrasting color, I used hand dyed cheesecloth to make smaller flowers in purple and in yellow. I added stems with three colors of pre-yarn. The leaves were made from a mixed green batt and dyed Wensleydale locks. The photo above shows the layout before wet down.

I had a bit of difficulty getting the 8mm habotai to felt into the pre-felt but most of it did eventually felt. It didn’t really matter since I was planning to wrap the piece around a canvas so I could staple the silk around the back even if it wasn’t completely felted in. I didn’t felt the piece completely, it’s still rather soft. But again, since it is going to hang on the wall, I didn’t think it needed to be as sturdy as something that would be worn.

And here is the finished piece. The canvas measures 24″ x 30″ so it is pretty large. The long skinny leaves are behind the cheesecloth but do give some depth.

Here’s a little closer view of the burlap vase and locks.

And here you can see some of the dimension added. Have you tried felting something with surface dimension? We would love to see what you create for the third quarter challenge.