felting – Page 3 – Felting and Fiber Studio

Felted Cat Cave, A Quick How To

May 27, 2018 Shepherdessann Comments 51 comments

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.

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

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.

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

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.

100_5909 web — 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.

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

May 11, 2018 Shepherdessann Comments 20 comments

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.

brown batt — brown/gray/black/white 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.

A Holiday Card and a Look Back and Ahead

December 26, 2017 Shepherdessann Comments 8 comments

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 150^th 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

Demo Last Weekend

September 29, 2017 Shepherdessann Comments 11 comments

This last weekend my guild did a Demo at the Carp Fair I went on the Sunday. I took a blending board to make some more rollags. I had some hand cards with me and I had a spindle I was spinning a rollag on so I could explain it all. It was very popular with the visitors to the fair. .

Bernadette was spinning Rambouillet on her wheel. In this picture she is Chain plying it.

Jan was working On the Edo Challenge. And Yes that is an octopus. I am hoping to get her to do a post about her progress. Here she is explaining it to some visitors.

Her fish was there on display and tried to eat a passing child.

Julie was weaving. She is doing shibori on the loom. She weaves the draw strings right into the scarf ready to be tightened up and then dyed. She has a finished sample onto of her loom.

And lastly 2 of the display tables.

I didn’t get any of the third table except Jan’s Fish. We had a great time chatting with people about spinning, weaving and felting. Have you been doing your crafts in public lately?

Fibrefest.

September 13, 2017 Shepherdessann Comments 13 comments

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

A Zed Inspired Book Cover

August 4, 2017 Shepherdessann Comments 10 comments

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?

Making a Feather

June 25, 2017 Shepherdessann Comments 16 comments

I had and odd special request several weeks ago, could I make a feather. Well sure I suppose I could, I say. A feather would do, but preferably if it could be held like a quill pen, it would be better. Sure I say, I can do that……. Next Figure out how to do that….

I started with this wool from Ashland Bay https://www.ashlandbay.com/sandalwood.

The first one I made was to flimsy so I did a second. I laid out the wool from a line in an upward angel to look like the lines on the vane of a feather. I did 2 of these one for each side of the feather.

I made the quill by wrapping a pipe cleaner in white wool and rolling it in a mat. After they were felted and fulled I cut one side of each strait so I could attach it to the quill part. I attached them by needle felting the vain to the quill. If you look close you can see the vain colour poking through the quill

To get the right shape for the feather I went to google images and searched for drawings of feathers for kids to colour. I printed out the one I liked and then drew around it to make it a little bigger. I cut it out and pined it to the wool and trimmed it.

Here is the Front and back finished.

I am generally happy but would have liked to have time to do another one. I like the way the vain looks in parts but would have liked the direction of the wool layout to remain more. I really like the upper part of the right side of the right picture. I was surprised at how much the purpley blue disappeared. I would like to make the quill part thinner next time but I am not sure how to do that and still have it stiff enough and with enough wool to attach the vain sides to it.

How would you tackle the problem of making a feather?

Second Quarter Challenge

March 31, 2017 Shepherdessann Comments 13 comments

I can’t believe it is April first tomorrow and time for the second quarter Challenge. We are doing Art periods this year. I decided to do Celtic art. Well then I started looking and of course it is not that simple. I decided to go with Early Celtic art, a term used for a period, stretching in Britain to about 150 AD. The other name for it is the La Tène period (broadly 5th to 1st centuries BC) this is a period when there were not so many “Celtic” knots and more people and animals in the art along with many swirls. I think of Celtic as being Irish but it starts over in Switzerland and spread out from there. I think, if I am reading it correctly, it’s the romans that squashed it over towards Ireland where it survive because the romans didn’t make it there.

This is a good reference http://www.ancient-celts.com/ancientvsmedievalart6.html these pictures came form this site.

I haven’t had time to make anything yet myself but I do love swirls and spirals.

Wikipedia has a lot more information that I won’t rewrite here for you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_art There are links to more information if you want the history part. And her are more pictures to inspire you art link . I hope you enjoy creating in this style. Please post your creations over on the forum. We like to see what everyone is doing, beginners and experts alike.

Felted Birdhouse Class

March 15, 2017 Shepherdessann Comments 12 comments

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.