Thin Felt and Spinning
Last week at the well-being centre I made a sample of felt that would be suitable for a lampshade cover. We’ve spoken about it there before, and samples usually explain things a lot better than words. I used a blended batt which was mostly Merino, but had some other fibres blended in too. I did two fine layers, then teased out some dyed locks to add, then did another two fine layers, and added embellishments. It was a lot duskier in colour than I expected:
Some of the embellishments I added were from a box listed as ‘silk threads’, I didn’t think they were, so burnt a piece when I got home, and it smelled like cellulose, so I’m going to guess they’re Viscose/Rayon. They’re really nice, whatever. I also used some throwster’s waste, nylon and viscose fibre:
I love holding thin pieces up to the window:
On this one you can see the losks between the layers a bit more clearly:
I mentioned not so long ago, I’d been writing a tutorial about how to make soft wispy felt, and I’ve finally nished it. Funnily enough, it’s called Learn to Make Soft Wispy Felt 🙂 I did a blog post about it the other day, and you can find all the info on the ‘Soft Wispy Felt’ page 🙂
I got my spinning wheel back out this week, I thought I’d finish off the batts I’d made with the ‘superwash’ type yarn to finish off the weaving. Apparently I hadn’t made any more purple, just a purple/blue blend and a multi batt. I span the multi batt first. It’s alright, but looks quite dull in places where there are too many colours:
I unwound some from the bobbin to see how it was looser, I liked how it looked in this photo when it twiddled itself together:
I was reading something for Ruth’s Fauvism challenge which got me thinking, so I made a thinner yarn with the purple/blue batt, really thin in places:
And I wanted something even thinner, so after a bit of a poor start with some green, got what I was after with some turquoise:
Then for some reason, yesterday, everything I tried was ‘bobbins’ as we say up here! (rubbish, from rhyming slang–bobbins of cotton=rotten). I must have put my tension spring thingie back on wrong!