Felting with friends: scarves, dying and more bags.
On our felting week end Maureen decided to do scarves. She wanted to try out some 50/50 merino silk that she had. She laid out the wool quite thin and rubbed it into prefelt.
Once it was prefelt she spun the water out of it and started cutting it. She made slits that she then stretched out and started fulling. You stretch and full, stretch and full and end up with great holes.
Next was into the dye pot. Although the scarf turned out great, it did not show off the silk. Usually the silk and wool take the dye a little differently, with this blend I was all one. We decided that it was because the it was to well blended.
Maureen did 2 more scarves one in the same style and one solid. Sorry the pictures of them did not turn out.
Diane hasn’t done a lot of dying so Diane and Maureen dyed some silk chiffon. The silk was twisted and dyed with several colors.
On the last afternoon I decided to make a bag for my mothers birthday.
The inside of the bag will have a red stripe. I used a combination of commercial prefelt and top. I also added some Blue Faced Lester wool to add some strength and stiffen it.
This is the outside. There is black next to the resist and the white on top. I wanted the black to migrate through the white and make a light gray. This is the finished bag. its reversible.
Diane decided she wanted a new shopping bag. She started out huge and did many layers of prefelt and wool.
Here she is fulling it
You can see it did shrink but just after this she gave up and said she will put it in the washer at home to see if she can shrink it more. At this point it is a large sturdy basket.
This is our group shot. We were very busy. You can see Maureen’s two scarves on the left.
The one on the right was one Maureen had made recently, added just the balance the picture. And finally that was the end of the weekend. We needed to go home and rest.