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Felting a Rug on a Trampoline

Felting a Rug on a Trampoline

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Our guest author/artist is Tuulikki Zara Rooke.

Last winter, I buried a couple of raw fleeces in the snow, and let the snow melt “wash” them. Well, it´s not the most thorough way of washing fleeces, but they were slightly whiter in colour, and smelled a little less sheepy when they thawed out in the spring. I have now used two of these fleeces to make a rug, with the assistance of my kids, on a trampoline.

Carding this amount of wool would take quite some time, so I decided to try just whipping the wool instead. As it was slightly windy, and the wool tends to fly around when you do this, I decided to do it on our trampoline, which has a security net around it. Very practical indeed. Beating the wool with sticks is a rather fun way to separate the fibres and, being on a trampoline, it was impossible to resist jumping around in the wool, too.

Photo 1

Now that we had all this wool on the trampoline, I figured we may as well try felting on the trampoline too. We laid out the wool on an old sheet, added a thin layer of carded wool on top, and finally raw locks in different natural colours. We wet it all down with hot water and soap, rolled it up, and then the girls and I (ok, mostly the girls, but I did join in for a bit) bounced around on the trampoline until we ran out of energy.

Photo 2

The next day, we added more hot water and soap and did a bit of rubbing and rolling. Then we rolled it out of the sheet and I let the girls bounce on the rug. An interesting and quite effective way to full a piece of this size.

Photo 3

Apart from being fun, and giving us quite a lot of exercise, there is a practical advantage to felting on a trampoline. All the excess water drains through the woven trampoline, which makes it easy to just keep adding more hot water during the felting process, and to get rid of excess water after rinsing the rug thoroughly with the garden hose.

Photo 4

 

A rug made with wool equivalent to about three fleeces can hold a lot of water. It took three days to dry. After that, I could add the final embellishments – swirls of black yarn that I needle-felted on the white centre.

Photo 5

It´s a thick and sturdy rug, measuring 115 cm (3.7′) across. It will probably stand for a lot of wear too, as it survived the rather harsh treatment on the trampoline.

Photo 6

Zara, thanks for sharing your family’s adventure with felt on a trampoline this summer.  It sure looked like fun with a beautiful result!

 

Raw Fleece Helmet

Raw Fleece Helmet

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A little while ago I showed you  the prototype for a large felt helmet I was planning and the finished hat. http://wp.me/p1WEqk-2rU  now I thought I would show you some of  the process. There are lots of pictures.

I used a dog brush to fluff up the ends of the horns. I never manage to keep the ends dry. I taped the resist inside the horn to the hat resist and then added some brown wool under the white so it wouldn’t show so much inside.

attaching the horn attaching the horn 2

plastic wrapped horns I wrapped the horn in plastic again so it wouldn’t stick to the hat.

curls on

I added the wool for this side then did the same on the other side and added the raw unwashed Wensleydale fleece form a sheep named Wiki. It was important to use an unwashed flees so I could keep the curls and not have them all felted down. You can see the dirt running off when I got it wet. It took a lot of soapy water to get it wet.

 

dirty sheep horns after first roll

The horns were a not very white after the first rolling.

After washing all the dirt was gone.

hat dry hat dry horns

Even after fulling it was a big hat. I wanted to put it over a helmet but couldn’t find one so I put a hard hat harness inside so it is adjustable.

hard hat harnis

And here is me in my hat.

me in hat web

 

Wool Supplies and Samples

Wool Supplies and Samples

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While I was laying out my white texture felt piece the other week, I had all my bags of white and light grey wools spread out on my floor, along with my stash of raw wool locks, so I thought I may aswell go ahead and do an inventory of my white wools, to see if I’m running low on any and need to order more. I usually keep a small stash of each wool breed (or colour) out in my felting boxes and put the rest away in my supplies bags and boxes, it makes it easier to have a large selection of breeds or colours to choose from without taking up as much room. These are the white wool tops, scoured and carded wools I most commonly use.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAMy favourite raw wool locks are Gotland, Teeswater and Wensleydale. There’s also some raw mohair locks here.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAfter scribbling down the names of all the different wools I commonly use, I checked whether there was a good amount in my felting box and whether I was low in my supplies and needed to order more. This took a while, and it suddenly occured to me that if I made myself a document on Word, I could print it out any time I needed to do another stock check. It’s only taken me about 4 years of felting to think of that 🙂

WHITE WOOLS INVENTORY

A few years ago, I spotted some really inexpensive index card holders in our local supermarket. I thought they would be perfect to use for wool samples, so I bought a few and made myself a cover for one.

4635492385_23f0e04d9f_oI like to pull off a small sample of wool tops and staple it to the index card with the name of the shade or blend. I buy almost all of my supplies from World of Wool, but on the rare occasion I buy something elsewhere, I make a note of that too.

coloursIt’s really handy for natural wools too, the texture and staple length can be seen as well as the colour.

naturalsDo you have a system for storing your wools and fibres or keeping track if supplies are getting low? How about storage? I know that is always a favourite topic for fibre artists! 🙂

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