nylon fibres – Felting and Fiber Studio

Experimenting With Fibres

February 25, 2019 zedster66 Comments 12 comments

I posted a couple of months ago about using some of my friend’s hair decoration as an embellishment. She recently had some more in really nice colours, and saved them for me when she took them out. They look something like this. I took them with me to the well being centre a couple of weeks ago, and it tured out there was just me there that day. So I kind of spread out a little bit!:

These are the fibres/hair extensions, they start out straight, but end up wavy or crimped depending on how they’re used:

I blended some Merino to match:

I started with matching the fibres to the blends:

I used the same wool blends twice:

But used different coloured fibres on top at the other end (not great photos)

As soon as I started to wet it down it felt like there were far too many fibres on top. They kind of look/feel like trilobal nylon, but not quite as fine.

It took a lot to get it felted, the fibres acted like a barrier between my hands and the wool, I had to rub mostly from the back. I even resorted to rolling the felt in a bamboo mat. This is how it looked when it was dry:

You can see how much of the fibre is loose:

Not quite as much at this end:

I tugged off lots of loose fibre and this is how it looked afterwards:

It looked like I pulled it all off, but it was more obvious looking on an angle:

And I had to get a supermacro close up!

I did have another play around with the hair extensions, I’ll show that piece next time 🙂

Finished Felt Inspired By Paintings

June 30, 2018 zedster66 Comments 10 comments

As promised last time, here’s a photo of the finished piece I showed being laid out:

I did make a few small changes to it, just moving one piece of prefelt and a few fibres. This is the painting I was working from:

It’s quite texturey, which you can see better from this angle:

Using just a few colours, gives quite a lot of shades when they overlap or blend:

I thought the migration from the prefelt through to the back was interesting:

After I’d laid that piece out I had a flick through my notebook and found another piece for inspiration. It’s a really simple piece, but I’d used some colours I’d blended:

What was different/nice with this one was the sheen, you can see from this angle:

I wasn’t aiming to replicate this one at all, just use as inspiration. I even found a mastching weird pinky red Merino – ‘Damask’ for the base:

I used Rose and Viscose fibres for the shiny parts, and a small amount of Nylon for the matte:

I really like how it turned out, having some matte areas seemed to make the shiny fibres shinier:

I did add some shiny fibres to match the ‘Damask’ background, but not much:

Playing Around

June 6, 2018 zedster66 Comments 6 comments

I’ve had a note on my kitchen white board for months which just says “unravelled knitting and plastic fibre.” I was stirring a pan of instant noodles one day and thought how much they looked like unravelled knitting and how much the frothy, boiling water reminded me of plastic fibre. I intended to make it in felt, but only got around to it yesterday. I picked Charolais wool, I thought this would make a spongy felt and help create the right effect. I think I would have been better off with something like Cheviot. This is the full piece:

Close up of the plastic fibre as frothy, boiling water:

Close up of unravelled knitting (which I think was mostly wool) as instant noodles:

While I had my White Wools tub out, I thought I’m make another couple of pieces to try combining different wools with fibres. This one was made with English 56s. It was a bit different to previous packs I’ve had, the fibres were much longer, almost like there was a high Devon content. I used some hand dyed Nylon Fibres. I love the colours you get with Nylon, especially the blues, which is why there are so many shades on this:

I don’t know if it’s obvious to you, but it definitely has a different look this Eng 56s, more ‘wavy’:

Here’s a close up of some green (the blue was impossible to capture)

For my last piece I used my new favourite wool, Rambouillet. And some fibres I have a ton of, crimped polyester lap-type things, (or as the shops call it ‘Hallowe’en cobwebs’!). I’ve tried this before with various results. It really attached well into the Rambouillet:

It looked to me like wet paper, the way it will form to whatever it dries on top of.

It kept a lot of its crimpy character while still forming a mat of fibres:

It was quite hard to get close ups, the green and orange are both fluorescent. Green:

Orange:

I don’t have any plans for them, I just needed a ‘play day’ 🙂

Nylon

January 14, 2012 zedster66 Comments 6 comments

Part Two: Trilobal Nylon top

Another Nylon fibre I’ve been using recently is Rainbow Trilobal nylon tops. Trilobal nylon is incredibly bright and shiny, sparkly even. Just like other nylon, it can be dyed with acid dyes. The Rainbow top I used was from World of Wool. I’ve used it ‘as it comes’ for surface design on a few felt pieces, but for this piece, I separated the individual colours and blended the nylon with merino of similar shades.

It felts really nicely, and gives an interesting texture to the felt, aswell as a shiny, sparkly look. Like other nylon fibres it is really inexpensive and a great way for adding interest to felt.