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A Spring Shawl

A Spring Shawl

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This is a throwback post. We had a very busy first day at the farmers market. The busiest day we have ever had. We had what we thought was a 3-week supply of Pasties and sold all but 2 of them. So there will be no felting this week while I restock 4 flavours of pasties for next week and hopefully enough to last more than one week. So, I hope you enjoy this post from a few years ago.

The museum store wanted some shawls that are more “springy”.  This is the first one.

It is a pastel pink and blue silk with pale pink wool on 2/3 of it. I then added some silk hanky flowers and leaves at each end and in the middle. It was to plane so I added some more leaves down the length. At this point, I remembered to take some pictures.

pink-shawl-silk-flowerspink-shawl-left-end pink-shawl-middle pink-shawl-right-end

The pink wool is in a very thin layer so it will be very lightweight for spring. The finished piece is about 15 inches wide so it can be a small shawl or a wide scarf.

finished-spring-shawl finished-spring-shawl-wool-side-2

finished-spring-shawl-wool-side-1 finished-spring-shawl-silk-side

I like doing shawls with a silk section left to float as you walk.

The pictures are in my studio, taken hastily as my turn to blog snuck up on me. Everyone seems to be complaining about it being too dull outside to take pictures. I have the opposite problem. The sky is blue, the sun is shining and the ground is covered in white highly reflective snow. It is blinding out there.

Are you thinking about spring things with soft colours or are you still in hibernation with warms cozy colours?

 

 

Guest Blog Post – The Bird And His Breakfast

Guest Blog Post – The Bird And His Breakfast

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This is a guest post by Lyn of Rosiepink. She created a wonderful piece for the Second Quarter Challenge. Thanks Lyn!

The second quarter challenge is to use fabric as a surface design instead of a base, so
out came my boxes of fabric! Spring has come to my garden and it’s a welcome sight after the winter, so what better place to find inspiration for my challenge piece – the bird and his breakfast.

First I drew a bird. It’s not accurate, anatomically speaking, but I like its quirkiness.

After a lengthy rummage through my fabric stash – and finding lovely pieces I’d
forgotten all about – I chose two very open weave fabrics for the background and the
bird so that the nuno felt would end up flat rather than ruched…

…then I made two pieces of nuno felt using four fine layers of white merino wool under
each piece of fabric.

The brightly coloured fabric was a triangle, so I cut it in half and placed the two pieces
together to make a square to make the felting easier – you can see the cut in the photo
above.

Both pieces of nuno felt needed a light shave to remove the superfluous white fluff from
the surface to reveal the bright colours. You can see the white fluff obscuring the colours in this angled shot…

…and here’s a close up of pre and post shave – quite a
difference.

The bird has 12 distinct shapes within its form, so I used the drawing as a pattern to cut
12 shapes from the brightly coloured felt when it was dry.

Using the side of a dark blue ‘Sharpie’ pen point, I touched along the edges of every
shape to give a little definition. I coloured in the eye, using the same pen, then added
three small white stitches for the eye-glint.

I needle felted the pieces into place – it was a bit like doing a jig-saw! I didn’t go too
close to the edges of the nuno felt shapes because I thought it might disturb the surface
too much. I needle felted gently so that the shapes adhered to the background but didn’t flatten, so the bird is in relief.

The worm is wool yarn needle felted into place. The piece of worm going from the
ground to the beak is thin compared to the bit hanging from the bird’s beak to show how
stretchy worms can be!

Great post, thanks Lyn!

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