Browsed by
Tag: jacob

More Natural Wools and Fibres

More Natural Wools and Fibres

I was looking through my flickr account recently for some photos to use on a flyer for the well being centre, and I came across some felt pieces I made with natural fibres and natural wool combinations. I haven’t done a post about ‘naturals’ for a while so I thought you might enjoy this old post from 2012:

Another couple of natural wool and natural fibre combinations I’ve used recently are Oatmeal Bluefaced Leicester with Ingeo top, and Humbug Jacob Tops with black and white Bamboo tops.

Humbug Jacob tops are a stripey blend of black and white Jacob wool tops. Just on its own it produces a nice result, but I thought I’d try using strips of black and white bamboo tops for effect. Both bamboos are really soft, white bamboo looks silky, but black bamboo is fluffy and more like fluffy cat fur. They felt quite differently too, the white keeps its silkiness and shines really nicely, and the black almost fades into the background, staying very matt.

Ingeo is made from corn, it is soft and shiny and smells faintly of caramel 🙂 I decided to cover the whole piece with Ingeo as it has such a lovely sheen. This was another fibre which shone even in dim light. The effect after drying is gorgeous, Ingeo is such a nice silky fibre and went really well with the Oatmeal Bluefaced Leicester. I think this combination would make a lovely soft and shiny scarf.

*The previous post I’d made was also about natural wools and fibres, if you’re interested, you can find it here

An Old Piece and a New Piece

An Old Piece and a New Piece

I only realised yesterday when I started to plan my blog post, that all my photos are still on my old hard drive. I was looking for another felt scrap piece that I recently started on when I came across a piece I made quite a while ago which I never posted about. If any of it looks familiar, it’s because I used it for the banners for the studio site and the forum 🙂
I wanted to make a piece with colours and textures inspired by the natural colours of the landscapes between Manchester and West Yorkshire. I used lots of different coloured natural wools and wool tops: Merino, Bluefaced Leicester, Manx Loaghtan, Zwartble, Black Welsh Mountain, Jacob, Gotland. I also used raw gotland locks and Lincoln locks.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI mostly used mid to dark shades of wool and animal fibre, there’s some sandy coloured Alpaca in here too.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAFor texture I used some wool nepps.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAnd also some silk noil, I added a lot of this so it would look like a solid band.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERATo create a kind of mossy/spongey moorland type grass look, I blended some plastic fibre with some natural shades and  green shades of merino.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI was really pleased with the way it turned out, especially the shape, I wanted an organic shape because I thought this suited it better.
I did find the scrap piece that I was working on, I think this will be the outside of a notebook cover.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

More Natural Wools and Fibres

More Natural Wools and Fibres

Another couple of natural wool and natural fibre combinations I’ve used recently are Oatmeal Bluefaced Leicester with Ingeo top, and Humbug Jacob Tops with black and white Bamboo tops.

Humbug Jacob tops are a stripey blend of black and white Jacob wool tops. Just on its own it produces a nice result, but I thought I’d try using strips of black and white bamboo tops for effect. Both bamboos are really soft, white bamboo looks silky, but black bamboo is fluffy and more like fluffy cat fur. They felt quite differently too, the white keeps its silkiness and shines really nicely, and the black almost fades into the background, staying very matt.

Ingeo is made from corn, it is soft and shiny and smells faintly of caramel 🙂 I decided to cover the whole piece with Ingeo as it has such a lovely sheen. This was another fibre which shone even in dim light. The effect after drying is gorgeous, Ingeo is such a nice silky fibre and went really well with the Oatmeal Bluefaced Leicester. I think this combination would make a lovely soft and shiny scarf.

Natural Wools and Natural Fibres

Natural Wools and Natural Fibres

One of the projects I’ve been working on in the last few months is using natural coloured wools with natural ‘other’ felting fibres. It’s not always easy working out which fibre will match with which colour wool because they often look very different when felted, and some fibres which seem to felt well on most wools, suddenly don’t with another. A couple of natural fibres I really like are soybean fibre and flax (linen).

Flax looks like dried grass, it doesn’t look like it’d felt very well, but it does.  I used it here with natural brown Merino tops.

Flax Fibre
 

Merino and Flax before felting

After felting it is a lot softer and shinier than before. 

Merino and Flax after felting

Soybean top is gorgeous. It is soft, golden yellow and much shinier than silk. I used it with some natural black Jacob tops. After felting, I’d left it to dry on a table, and walking past, I saw the soybean top shining like gold in the dim light. I took a few photos hoping it’d show up and was really surprised when it did. It looked gorgeous. It wasn’t as easy to capture the true colour and shine once it had dried, but it really is a gorgeous fibre.

Soybean top
Jacob and Soybean top drying
Jacob and Soybean top

Do you have any favourite natural fibres and wool breeds?

%d bloggers like this: