reusing felt – Felting and Fiber Studio

Striped felt background with tryout of branch, leaf and lichen.

Creating Felt Artwork from my Fiber Stash

May 11, 2024 ruthlane Comments 23 comments

On to a new piece and the thoughts of what should I create? I like to look through my stash and see what I have to use up. I was gifted with a large amount of wool and other finished fiber pieces when my friend Paula stopped felting. What can I find for my next piece?

I looked through my bag of dyed silk pieces and also a bag of felted pieces that need to be re-used or cut up or whatever else comes to mind. So I found these two pieces. The stripey piece is a cobweb scarf with a fringe of felted cords. The silk is a piece that I dyed many moons ago.

As you can see in this photo, the scarf was very lightly felted and had lots of holes in it. I thought that the scarf was more like prefelt than completely fulled. So I decided to cut it into three pieces and layer them together so the felt would be more solid. I left the fringe off and thought I could use it later. I then added the piece of silk to one side as I thought the combination of the two would give an interesting surface to work on.

So I felted them together and the silk was barely attached after much work. Hmm… Plus you can’t see the stripes from the wool through the silk since it didn’t penetrate very well. What to do?

I turned the piece over and liked the back side much better. It looks like a tree trunk to me! I pulled the silk off the back which came right off and decided to work on the plain felt instead. I’m sure I will be able to use the silk piece for something else in the future.

So thinking tree trunk, I thought perhaps the cut off fringe could be made into a branch. I have rolled the fringe and edge up a bit and I’m trying it out on the tree trunk. The branch of leaves to the left is one that I made last year with wrapping yarn around wire and stitching and burning tea bag leaves.

I had a few bits of “lichen” that I made from painted interfacing so I added those into the tryout. So now I have a direction to go with this piece. Next up will be painting the tea bag paper and interfacing so I can make more leaves and lichen. I think I will jazz up the color a little bit since the tree trunk is so colorful. I’ll let you know how that goes in my next post.

Small felt

March 31, 2022 Shepherdessann Comments 9 comments

As some of you know I am moving my studio. I am not moving far, just from one end of the building to the other. I will gain some storage space, another room and a direct entrance. And importantly I will be closer to the bathroom.

I have packed 90% of my studio into boxes and they are piled up in the extra room. Consequently, I do not have a lot to work with. I did make a box with a blob of each colour of merino I have. and collected a bag of prefelts etc.

So there I was on Monday, wondering what on earth I would post about today. I was looking at my inspiration file and going through e bags of prefelt and I found this small odd-shaped one.

This is the back of it because I forgot to take a picture before adding wool to the front.

I added some sky

A blue sky is pretty much one colour. light at the bottom but not a mix of colours. The grass on the other hand is not one colour. so I mixed some up using my dog brushes.

this is the finished background. the needle is to give you an idea of the size. Jan thought it looked knife-shaped I thought it looked like a bullet train.

I want to add some flowers along the bottom. I wasn’t sure what thread to use. I hat unpicking so I grabbed a piece of fulled sweater off cut and covered it in green to try out some different threads.

the dark pink is Filtex. these are very old spools they are shiny rayon, like fake silk. the orange is 1,2 and 3 strands of embroidery thread., the blue is an embroidery cord and the green is a different kind of silk or fake silk embroidery yarn.

Here’s a picture of the back. You can see what each thread looks like a little better.

Next is doing the stitching. I think I will use the green to add a few bigger leaf shapes. the orange and blue worked well. I will try using 2 and 3 threads of the pink to see if they show up better. stitching on felt is odd. you have to make your stitch about twice as long as you want it to get it to show up the size you want. It must be because of how soft the surface is. Does anyone else also find this to be true?

Another Bag and More Unfinished Projects

September 6, 2016 zedster66 Comments 13 comments

If you’re anything like me, when you get the sewing machine and felt and/or fabric scraps out, you end up with stuff absolutely everywhere and a huge mess to tidy away afterwards which takes so long you start to consider whether you really need to use that room again or if you can get away with shutting the door on the mess forever. I usually try to make the most of it and do as many sewing projects as I can all in one go and live with the mess in the mean time. After making the satchel type bag, I had some good sized off cuts left over so thought I’d make myself another bag. This one is ‘passport bag’ size. This is what it looks like from the front with the flap closed:

And this is what it looks like with the flap open – I used magnetic closures again:

And this is what it looks like on the back:

I used quite a few of my recent nuno felt pieces, but also a few from ‘the box’ including the piece I used inside the flap which was a piece I made years ago with lots of different pieces of silk. I’ve got a few more half finished projects too, this next one will also be a piece for Ann’s 2nd quarter challenge, because I’m changing a piece of soft scruffy felt I made a while ago: