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Odds and Ends

Odds and Ends

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This past weekend, my husband and I drove up to Wisconsin for a weekend away.  I had hoped we’d see plenty of fabulous fall colors I could share.  Unfortunately, Wisconsin is suffering from the same drought we have here in Illinois and we arrived a week earlier than the peak.  Many of their trees have lost their leaves already, like ours here. But here is one fallish pic entering Wisconsin.

I haven’t been too productive this week.  But I do have a few projects I have put finishing touches on and haven’t shared.

I signed up for Ruth’s Printing and Stenciling on Felt class, so I managed to make a couple of handmade prefelts to play with.  I have plenty of commercial.  The purple was some unknown fiber batt. I decided to use a silk hankie to give it a little sparkle, but it didn’t.

The turquoise is commercial prefelt with some throwsters waste which isn’t very evident.

I think I will be able to use both sides just to experiment. I like the sides without the silk better.

I also made a thicker light blue batt with some mulberry silk.

I have no idea what I’ll be printing on any of these and have gathered a bunch of samples and other UFOs to experiment on.

Here is a failed coaster that had gold fabric felted in that I did a little free motion practice on.

A while back I had felted a bunch of samples from scarves.  I couldn’t find the post with the original scarves. One of them had dots which I wasn’t crazy about. I had done both sides and didn’t care for the inside either.  However, after felting the dots weren’t obvious, they looked more like flowers.  I made it into a little case and did a little embroidery on with with some silver floss for a little bling.

  The back:

The front has a little bit of black organic edging.

Nothing exciting this week, but I got to re-purpose a few things.

 

Nothing Spooky Here

Nothing Spooky Here

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Update on Maneki-Neko:

I took Lyn’s advice and made the whiskers from wire.  Here is the new look.  I also decided to put her on a pedestal to see out the window rather than sitting on the windowsill.  I found an old pot and turned it upside down, but I’m thinking gold may be better.  Although, when she’s in the window you can’t see the pot.

 

I recently realized I needed to carry on my tradition of giving each grandchild a pumpkin wall hanging.  I have a new grandson, Ken who arrived early in April.

But I didn’t really have a nice orange to make the pumpkin.  So, I made a batt using hand dyed Corriedale, a funky orange pink merino, bright orange coarse commercial fiber, gold merino, hand dyed Domestic 56s with Logwood from Cathy and a touch of white.  You can see the batt in the back.  I think the color turned out well.  I also used the merino/silk mix for the stem that I had used in the Edo challenge with the Sakura branches.

I had made a sketch of how I wanted the pumpkin to look.  A bit different than his sister Lisa’s girly pumpkin from last year.

Of course, I got into laying it out and cutting the prefelts and forgot to take pictures.  But here is Ken’s dried pumpkin.

Then after a little shave.

Now I guess I’d better start thinking about the upcoming holidays.  Did you do anything for Halloween?

Pandagirl’s 1st Quarter Challenge 2017

Pandagirl’s 1st Quarter Challenge 2017

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Last month Ruth Lane announced the 1st Quarter Challenge focusing on Fauvism. If you missed it, you can read about it here:

https://feltingandfiberstudio.com/2016/12/31/2017-quarterly-challenges/ 

I had a  hard time deciding what to do and looked through a lot of photos and pictures for inspiration.  Finally, I came across an old postcard from Hawaii of a ship on the sea under dark skies that intrigued me.

I decided I would concentrate on bold colors and simplified forms.   Here is my layout:

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I used prefelts I had previously made and batts I had on hand. Please ignore my messy work table.  It’s hard to tell from the monitor, but the sail next to the green one is a teal color.  Here it looks blue. Also the dark blue boom above the body of the boat got lost because of the blue water. I didn’t notice that when I laid it out.

After felting:

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I probably should have stopped fulling sooner.  I had used a Domestic 56 base so it needed shaving.  I couched some yarn for the masts and used yellow thread for the halyards (I believe that is the correct for the ropes connected.)

I decided to frame it.  I had an old frame I had used for papermaking and it fit perfectly.

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I’m not sure if this is in true Fauvist style, but I was pleased with the result.  Have you started the challenge yet?

 

Combining Weaving and Felting by Fiber Artist Cathy Wycliff

Combining Weaving and Felting by Fiber Artist Cathy Wycliff

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For many years I have been a lover of textiles, but I never wanted to knit or weave. Too fiddly….knit, purl, knit, purl. Or weave to a pattern but first figure out the sett, the epi. No, not me.

And then last year, I saw Meta vd Knijff’s small homespun weavings on felt on Flickr. Meta also uses natural dyes and paints and takes cool photographs as well. Meta is an artist in the Netherlands who I discovered on Flickr. So, back to the weavings on felt. I thought, hmmmm, if I could do that with weavings, then maybe I would like to weave. Then I discovered Saori weaving quite by accident, somewhere on the world wide web and subsequently took instruction.

I discovered that weaving doesn’t have to have patterns, that weaving can be creative and free, and what’s more–I could combine it with felt.

Over the period of a week or two, I made a bunch of small sample weaves, no plan in mind whatsoever. Then I grabbed some pre-felt I had in my stash, some homemade and some commercial. I fooled around placing the small weavings on pre-felt.

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Most of the weaving samples are cotton and/or wool, and all are woven on black thin cotton warp. There may be the odd novelty yarn thrown in there, since when I was weaving samples, I was not thinking about combining them with felt. I chose 3 samples to felt with: the largest is multi-colored, all cotton warp with all cotton weft. I chose a large bright turquoise commercial pre-felt batts called “Maori” from Opulent Fibers, which I recall being Corriedale. I used small pieces of the same prefect batt to cover parts of the all-cotton weaving.

The second largest piece was a weaving I made with mostly wool and some cotton weft. I used as pre-felt a piece I had cobbled together with my naturally dyed wool, half madder and half logwood. I did not use any wool wisps to cover parts of this weaving.

The last and smallest piece was a small sample weaving I made using partial wool, cotton and nylon weft on cotton warp. I placed the weave onto cider merino ( handmade by me) pre-felt–again no wool wisps to cover.

I felted all of them in the usual way but not rolling as long as normal because I had used pre-felt as the base. Besides, I was impatient to see how they turned out! All of them successfully felted, although I did use a bit of needle-felting to secure some areas, mostly with the largest all-cotton weaving. I think that will make a nice wall-hanging for someone who likes a lot of brightness in their decor. Unsure about the medium-sized one, perhaps a small wall-hanging or pillow-cover? And the third piece I have fashioned into a cuff with vintage buttons. The inside is soft as merino should be!

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Any weavers out there? You really don’t need a floor loom if you would like to get started weaving. You can even use a table loom, a pin-loom, or just hammer some nails into an old wooden photo frame, and you’ll be ready to weave and felt!

 

Thanks Cathy for yet another fiber technique to try!

Combining Techniques and Materials

Combining Techniques and Materials

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I’ve been planning this picture for a while.  It’s not the first time I’ve combined techniques, but this time I wanted to add more dimension to the picture.

It may seem like an odd choice of subject, but my sister Lorraine has loved elephants all her life and this is a little thank you for the Trunk Show I had at her Quilt Club a few months back.

I started by dyeing some silk and wool, then making batts.  My original intent was to use the silk for texturing on the trunks, but the area was too small and since I wasn’t going to use it over all the elephants I let the idea go.

I built up the trunks, faces and foreground legs with coarser wool underneath, sewed them closed with wool thread and used resists under the ears.  The eyes are garnets.  I don’t know why the pics look brown, the prefelt was shades of gray.

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The base was made beforehand with Corriedale.  Before placing the elephants on I used batts for the water, sky, background and tree tops.  The light beige ground is hand dyed silk gauze.  I also used bits of Oussant fiber (from France) sent to me by forum member Aphee.  They are the brown and beige areas in the foreground.

Of course, I had to add a little silk to the water and sky.

The tree trunks are silk/merino mix.

Once the background was all laid out, I added the elephants and needlefelted them down.  This is before  felting and fulling.

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I did get some texture in the elephants, but the picture was a little flatter than I wanted so I added some needlefelting and fiber to the tree trunks and around the legs, hand embroidery on the toes and around the eyes, stitching and free motion stitching in the foreground grasses.  Also the Oussant flattened losing it’s springy texture so I needlefelted more of it to give better dimension.20150926_125059

The treetops in the background were purposely left vague to let the elephants have center stage.  More needlefelting and adding fiber for dimension and texture.

20151007_155604Some detail closeups.

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Final hanging on the wall.  I may have fulled it a little too much but I was worried about the thickness of the dimensional parts.

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I sure hope my sister likes it.

Easter Baskets

Easter Baskets

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With Easter around the corner, I decided to make Easter baskets for my grandsons this year.

Since I didn’t have a container the size or shape I wanted, I chose to make a resist using Rosiepink’s “How to Make Vessels with a Resist” ebook.

I wanted to put a different design on each side, but have both the same. A bunny on one side and a chick on the other.  Then I made a resist design on paper and cut a template from plastic flooring material.  After sketching out a design, I made some prefelts in colors I didn’t have because I decided it would be easier to control the small design pieces.

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I cut out the designs from the prefelt and needle felted them together using yarn to decorate the eggs.  I used an extra white layer underneath the bunnies because I didn’t want the background colors coming through after fulling.  I also used another layer under the bottom of the eggs to level them out.  Before laying out on the resist:

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At the last minute I changed the position of the eggs making them vertical instead of horizontal.  When I put the designs on the resist they were too tall!  Back to the drawing board to make a bigger resist.  I added another two inches in height to accommodate the height and shrinkage.

Since they are baskets, I wanted to make them look like it.   So, I alternated background colors on the first layer.  It got tricky on the second layer because the roving was laid out perpendicular and the colors didn’t match because of the staple length.  I found the sparse spots and filled in those colors first then proceeded with the second layer design careful to alternate the side colors as well. I used four layers total one side at a time.

First layer
First layer

 

After I finished felting, fulling and shaping, I noticed my bunny and chick designs were too low.  I’m sure the kids won’t care, but I’ll know better next time.  I was very pleased with the final result.  Although, the bunnies need some whiskers. Any suggestions?

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To finish it off, I made basket handles by braiding roving, then felting and fulling them.  I also used Zed’s “Polymer  Clay Simply Made” ebook to make “egg” buttons. That was fun, too.  I still have to put them together.  The handles are soft which was intentional so that we could easily pack them and use the buttons to remove the handles.

What spring or Easter projects are you working on?

Thanks to Lyn and Zed for creating such easy to follow tutorials!

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