pre felt – Felting and Fiber Studio

Soon to be leaves; purpose made prefelt

October 15, 2020 Shepherdessann Comments 6 comments

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.

Felt Pod with Differential Shrinkage Has a Mind of It’s Own

January 23, 2020 ruthlane Comments 16 comments

I am continuing on in the differential shrinkage experimentation mode and wanted to try a different shape with a resist and try again on the machine lace inclusion.

I stitched the stamen in a radiating pattern and doubled the length since my last ones were too short. I also am using a lighter inside wool color so that the black thread will show up better.

First, I decided on my resist shape and then covered it with four layers of batt on each side. The photo on the right shows the piece after a bit of felting. I really didn’t do that much felting but I should have paid a bit more attention. It was too felted and really already past the pre-felt stage. I haven’t used these short fiber merino batts that much and boy do they felt fast! But since I wasn’t paying enough attention, I just kept going.

I then cut the “pre-felt” into 5 pieces and started on the inner layer.

I used the same resist again and put the machine lace stamen in place over the resist. I covered that with a thin layer of merino wool in a yellow (with a green tinge). Then at the last moment, I decided to add a stem. So I whipped up a stem with brown and burnt orange and added that to the inner layer.

Now to add the “pre-felt” back over the inner layer and ready to felt. I took quite a bit of time trying to get the green to adhere to the yellow but it just wasn’t to be. I did add a bit more green wool to the top of the “petals” so that they would adhere better to the stem.

It seemed like it had started to adhere slightly to the yellow so I thought if I took the resist out and worked from the inside, that it might get those yellow fibers to adhere to the back side of the green. But that really didn’t work. There were a few places where it adhered slightly but I needed to have roughed up the inside of the green felt and that might have worked. But really, I should have done less felting of the green so that it was still pre-felt.

So it didn’t turn out as planned. It looks more like a flower than a seed pod. The yellow layer is separate from the green and therefore, I didn’t get any differential shrinkage. The new stamen worked better than the last experiment and didn’t adhere to the felt even though I never covered them with plastic. But it is an experiment so I will just go with the result.

I decided the stem needed more dimension so I needle felted some grooves and notches to give it a more natural feel.

I’m not sure how many times I need to learn that sometimes wool/felt has a mind of it’s own. Also, that I can’t rush the process or not pay attention. That’s usually when I set myself up for disappointment. But I accept that it’s just another learning opportunity and an experiment. And perhaps, next time, I will remember to not rush the process.

Pre-Felt Samples and Nuno Scarf

November 26, 2017 zedster66 Comments 11 comments

While I had my pre-felt out doing the Suprematist pieces, I thought I’d try a few more samples using it. I’ve only used it a few times, but the suprematist pieces were so quick to felt, I thought it might be quite handy for making small pieces for greetings cards. The first one I tried was using some fibre and cotton gauze ‘paper’ I’d made a few years ago. The pieces were already cut out, I carefully peeled off the gauze and laid them on a piece of prefelt:

I can’t remember which fibre I used, but it looks shiny and metallic in real life, like copper, bronze and graphite, not dull brown, pink and grey! The piece is quite flat:

I used some dyed Silk Carrier Rods for the other two pieces, this first one has ‘whole’ layers peeled from the rods before dyeing:

There’s a bit more texture on this piece:

I used small bits of dyed silk rods on this piece, bits which fell off during peeling or after dyeing:

This had more texture too, probably because the pieces overlapped more:

I’ve been into making scarves lately, or more precisely endlessly carding wool and ironing scrim for making scarves, but I have finished a couple. This is a white one I made a few weeks ago:

I used rose fibre for embellishing:

I cut the scarf wider than my template, and scrunch gathered it to size before adding the wool, so it’d have some texture on the back:

And it only took about half an hour to do the photos this time!

Maneki-Neko for 2017 3rd Quarter Challenge Part 2

October 3, 2017 Marilyn aka Pandagirl Comments 23 comments

I never dreamed this project would take me almost two weeks to complete. But it is finished.

If you missed part one, you can read about it here:

https://feltingandfiberstudio.com/2017/09/25/pandagirls-maneki-neko-for-2017-3rd-quarter-challenge-part-1/

It would seem adding the details to finish would be easy. Not!

I needle felted blue roving around the eyes. The gems underneath are actually blue, but because they were put over black it wasn’t obvious what color they were.

Then I spent time looking for a gold bell, but decided on using a wool ball instead. When I added the ribbon I made a slit on both sides of the arm to pull it thru.

The nose and mouth are also needle felted. But at one point, the nose fell off and had to be reattached.

I curled over the raised paw and secured it in order to show the paw and nails.

The nails proved to be a real challenge and after ripping them out at least a half dozen times, trying needle felting, then using floss and finally rayon thread.

I tried needle felting the arm in front and the tail in back to show the dimension, but it was negligible partly because of it being black. So, I stitched around them which helped.

Another challenge was the writing on the coin. I made a gold prefelt and copied the characters I had translated from an app for Good Health and confirmed with my daughter in law, Mari. I transferred the characters to a stabilizer.

I thought using the satin stitch on my Pfaff machine would work, but its not a straight satin stitch, but the stitches varied. So I decided to use a triple stitch which was fine until I reached curves. I ended up finishing by hand. I’m hoping I haven’t butchered the characters too much. After finishing the coin, I slip stitched it to the kitty.