Felting and Fiber Studio

The first thing I did this week was felt the three feathers onto a another larger piece of prefelt. I didn’t loose a lot of color, but some of the definition was lost especially on the yellow.  I will probably embellish this at a later time.

I also made four large merino felt pieces to use stamps and found objects on.  I made several stamps and cut out a couple of stencils from Mylar.  Here are some of the found objects.

I don’t know what the orange thing is, but I bought it Kohls on clearance a while back.  There’s a scraper, bottle top, leaf stamp, tupperware lid, a piece of what I think was a vegetable tray liner, a felt ornament I glued onto a ceramic tile and a reverse stamp I had made out of clay a long time ago.  I won’t show the other stamps since its proprietary to Ruth’s class material.

I started with lighter colors like yellow and continued to try new stamps and objects with different colors and thicknesses.  I really had difficulty getting good prints. Its probably the operator and not the materials or classwork.

I had made one stamp with shapes another with leaves.  I basically painted the dyes on to get a decent print with some texture.  you can see them in teal and blue.

I used a commercial bird stencil with black and green dyes on the purple prefelt I had made.

It was unknown fiber and would stick to the stencil brush or foam brush.  You can see the fiber standing up in the second pic.

Then I had made a mylar stencil of a cat and stenciled that on a piece I had done last week.  I will felt that  and the birds later.

We were also encouraged to try printing on paper.  I have a bunch of handmade paper from my papermaking days, so I tried the felt snowflake again and got a good print, then went around the edges using up the dye and giving it a bit of texture for a background.

I set all the pieces except for the large piece and the paper. I also included the flower piece from last week.  Surprisingly it bled and I couldn’t wash it out.

I was very disappointed in this since it looked so nice before setting the dye.  I’m not sure what to do to fix it.