guest blogger – Felting and Fiber Studio

Different Shaped Pods From Circular Resists

May 6, 2017 zedster66 Comments 21 comments

Today we have the first of a few guest posts from our forum member Tracey.

I am very interested in the different ways that pods and vessels can be shaped, often seeing a felted piece and thinking ‘what shape resist did they use?’
The first pod pictured here was made using a 12” diameter round resist. It has six layers of blended Merino wool each side, and it is embellished with silk yarn and mulberry silks. I cut a 3” slit in the centre to extract the resist once fulled, and it resulted in an oval opening. A crossed slit would make the opening more rounded, or you can just cut a small circle. It is always better to start small, you can then make the opening bigger if required.

I also made a seashore pod. This was made the same way as the green pod but I think the resist was about 19” diameter, quite big! I blended blues to replicate the sea and added white silk caps and curly locks to hopefully look like the crashing waves. I then sewed a few shells and sea glass onto the beach, using invisible thread.

Then as an experiment, I felted over another slightly smaller resist of 10” diameter, decorated it with silk caps and silk tops. This time I cut the opening to extract the resist on the outer edge of the circle, so the bottom of the ‘vase’ is the opposite side to the cut, and here is the result.

I may sew beads around the top in an idle moment!
Here is a picture of where the openings were cut to extract the resist on the green and blue pods:

Expanding the Felting and Fibre Community

July 4, 2013 zedster66 Comments 5 comments

Most of our readers will probably know that apart from the four of us who do this blog, there are a lot of regular commenters who contribute too. We also have lots of regulars over at the forum and we know from the stats that we get an average of 160 ‘unique’ visitors to the site every day. We’d like to give anyone who’s interested the opportunity to get more involved.

You probably know that we’ve already had a few guest artists and writers. And we want to expand that. We want to do more ‘Meet the Artists’ but we’d also like to meet the suppliers who make all this possible: the people who provide us with our fabrics or wool, fleeces and animal fibres; the people who dye the wool, threads, yarns and fibres we love to use; those who sell haberdashery supplies or jewellery findings…anything we use in the production of our felt, fibre and mixed media artworks.

We’d really like to feature more guest writers. The posts we’ve had before were really popular. So, if you have something you’d like to write about that you think our readers would be interested in…a visit to a fibre fair or maybe a farm; your experience of selling at a craft fair or market; a project you’re working on; a tutorial you’ve written or maybe you just want to tell us about your craft, we’d love for you to get involved. It doesn’t have to be a unique article, it could be one you’ve written for your blog. And it doesn’t have to be new, we’re always interested in reading about felt and fibrey things and we may have missed it. You don’t have to have your own blog either or have written something before, and it doesn’t have to be a certain length.

So, if you’re interested, let us know. Leave us a comment in reply to this post and we can email you back, or PM one of us on the forum. If you have something you want to promote or feature for a specific date, like a craft or fibre fair, try to let us know in good time so we can schedule it. Thanks 🙂 Oh, and if anyone missed the post about it on Facebook, the last day of every month is a kind of Promote your Product day, detailed here.