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Soon to be leaves; purpose made prefelt

Soon to be leaves; purpose made prefelt

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If you remember I started to work on a new cowl design for maybe teaching or maybe selling but at least one for myself. here the blog if you missed it or want to remind yourself. https://wp.me/p1WEqk-9Ha

Sorry to disappoint but it still isn’t finished. I did decide I wanted to put some autumn leaves on it so I made some prefelt to cut them out of. I started with green, I want it to be in the middle. I was thinking of having a little green showing at the edges might look nice.

then I added some reds orange and golden yellow. I did it in an odd pattern so I could cut out leaves that were not all one colour. The pictures are not great. No matter what I did they looked blurry. I think it’s too much light bouncing off the fibres it just can’t focus.

I flipped it over and laid out to “match” the other side. The green is thin so it wasn’t hard to see the colours through it.

Next, I got out my silk top and my silk hankies and put some on both sides to give it some shine. I tried to get pictures of it but it doesn’t show at all.

This is the finished piece. You can see the silk now.

There is only one more regular market day, this Saturday and then I get a break until the Christmas markets on Nov. 21 and 28. I plan to get the cowl done and to make some baskets to sell. So, fingers crossed, more to come.

 

Using Prefelt … Almost

Using Prefelt … Almost

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I’ve been meaning to make more of my own prefelt for ages. I have some commercial prefelt, but thought it’d be nice to have some in other colours and even multi colours. I also had the idea I wanted to recreate a band logo or design or something. There was one I had in mind, with only 3 colours, so I thought I’d start small. The first colour I needed was red:

And, I also needed black, not as much, but I wanted to make enough in case of mistakes:

And it’s probably a good thing I did! I’ve only cut simple shapes from prefelt before, all freestyle I think. I might have been a bit too ambitious with my idea … Firstly, all the faffing around with the design, simplifying it to individual colours, then making those just outlines, enlarging, printing, cutting out etc, that all took a couple of hours. Then I couldn’t find anything to trace around the shapes and leave a clear outline. So, for now, I’ll just have to show you the shapes ready for tracing:

Those are the main shapes (flames), there are some smaller ones I’ll need to do too. I don’t think there’s enough black for too many mistakes, so I’ll have to be careful!

One thing I do have finished is a bird pod. Probably better for nesting material, I think.

And the back:

Have you overestimated how ‘simple’ a project should be?

Die Cutting Felt

Die Cutting Felt

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Today I’m pleased to welcome Tracey Thompson as our Guest Artist. Tracey has been an active member on the forum and will be showing us her Die Cutting Machine and her experience cutting felt.

A recent post in the Felt and Fibre Forum led me to comment that I had tried to cut felt using a die cutting machine.  It was given to me free by a friend because she wanted to treat herself to the next model that had more bells and whistles!

Here is the die cutter, it is a Spellbinders Grand Calibur.  It cuts beautiful images in  card stock but how would it cope with felt?

I tried both commercial felt and my own prefelt in this machine.  The results were mixed with both felts, but I think this was largely down to the dies.  The more intricate the die, the more it mashed away at the felt, sometimes obliterating it!

I then remembered that I had a quite simple die in the shape of a snowflake, and as I still have Christmas cards to make, I thought I would have another go.  This next picture is my prefelt with the snowflake die and a Merry Christmas die.  The hole in the middle of the prefelt was where the snowflake came out perfectly, and the mashed up bit at the bottom was where Merry Christmas didn’t!

So I thought I would make a simple card to use the snowflakes on.  I put down two layers of Tanzanite from World of Wool, as I wanted a night time feel as a background.

I also wanted simple decoration, so I just lay a few blue and white mulberry silks on the top.

Here it is after felting.

I then ironed a piece of interfacing onto the back to make the stitching more stable. I had cut out a few snowflakes using a white commercial felt, and I used a double silver metallic thread to attach them to the felted piece.

So here is the finished card, it is a fairly simple one but it’s one to tick off the list!

Tracey, thanks for sharing your experience with us and for helping to fill in on my leave!