three dimensional – Felting and Fiber Studio

Influencing Shape with Fiber Layout and Prefelt

July 15, 2019 ruthlane Comments 13 comments

I am continuing with my experiments with how fiber layout and prefelt effect the shape of three dimensional wet felt. I decided to combine two of the things that I had tried before.

The first was the circular layout that I showed you in this post. The cone above was made with the same circular layout. I used orange wool and laid it in a circular pattern to make a small circle. Then I used an idea from Kim Winter of Flextiles which she showed in this post. I cut up some old felt into pieces and made sure the back fibers were roughed up.

Here’s the layout. There is a resist under the circle but I didn’t use it. It was just to get the circular shape easily. I removed it before felting. I then got so involved in working on the piece that I forgot to take any photos until I was finished. But I wet this down, turned it upside down and worked from the back side for quite a while rubbing and making sure that the yellow felt pieces were attaching. It actually worked better than I thought it would and the old felt attached right down to the orange wool. Thanks for the tip Kim!

Here is the result. When I was felting and fulling this piece, I kept working around in a circle so that the orange wool would shrink into a cone shape. With the addition of the yellow felt, the shape was definitely effected by the radiating felt shapes. It turned into a squash blossom all by itself! The formation of the 3D shape developed with minimal effort and shaping on my part.

Since it looked so much like a squash blossom, I added it to my squash pod from last week. They went together like I had planned it from the beginning. Of course if I had planned it, I don’t think they would have worked so well, but cheers for happy accidents.

Influencing Shape with Prefelt Part 2

July 7, 2019 ruthlane Comments 14 comments

I finally got around to trying a different shaped pod using prefelt to influence the shape. My first post creating a seed pod is here. I created this pod in the same way but started with a different shape and cut the prefelt differently. I decided to use a bit brighter color for the inside layer.

I used the same green batt that I had used on my last pod but used a tear drop shaped resist. I covered the resist and felted until it was holding together to make a prefelt.

I then cut a little cap off the top and a diagonal type cut all the way down to the end. The photo on the left shows the “front” side and the photo on the right is the “back” side.

I then took the green prefelt off the resist and covered it with orange wool and wet the orange wool down. Then I put the green prefelt back over top of the orange wool. I wrapped the orange wool around the resist from side to side. Next time, I think I would wrap it from end to end to get a more defined shrinkage but it worked this way too. The orange layer is fairly thin compared to the thicker green prefelt.

I then began felting the two together. I carefully rubbed along all the green edges and worked on getting the edges to stick down to the orange underneath. Once everything was holding together, I removed the resist. Then I fulled the piece and rubbed along the orange lines to get the resulting shape. I fulled it very hard so it would hold its shape easily.

And here’s the result. It does look very much like a seashell but also could be a chili pod or some other sort of veggie pod. These are really fun to make, have you tried this technique yet? Please show us your results over on the forum.

Keeping Summer Alive

November 14, 2014 Marilyn aka Pandagirl Comments 23 comments

This past spring, I had a real surprise when I noticed a little garden of violas growing in the cracks of our patio.

They flourished throughout the summer, but when the colder weather started to hit I knew I’d be sad to see them gone. I had purchased a picture frame at a garage sale over the summer with nothing special in mind, but then decided to keep the memory of my patio pretties alive thru a three dimensional felt representation.

I needle felted the flower, leaves and stems separately. Then I placed a plastic resist around some of the petals so that they could be manipulated into a shape while drying.

I used a white prefelt with just a hint of color in the background and placed the flowers, leaves and stems into position, gently needle felting them into place. Then I placed another resist under part of the leaf I want to raise before felting and fulling.