viscose tops – Felting and Fiber Studio

Felting With Viscose Tops

August 30, 2017 zedster66 Comments 11 comments

I was tidying away some felt the other day and remembered that I’d planned to make some felt pieces like the textured nuno pieces I made, but with different fibres instead of fabric. I laid out a couple of pieces the same way, but different sizes. I laid out two layers of dyed viscose fibre, then 4 fine layers of 23 mic Merino. I felted and fulled the first piece, then got my bead board out to full it more. I fulled until it was quite firm, but not stiff/rigid:

I got the texture I was expecting:

Considering the textured nuno, I didn’t expect so much migration, probably because the soft/fine pieces I’ve fulled really hard with fibres before were using white 18.5mic Merino, I thought it’d be less obvious this time:

I changed my plans when I got to the felted stage of the first piece, it looked and felt so nice. So, I decided I would just felt the next piece ‘normally’. Even if I hadn’t already decided that, I don’t think I could have ‘ruined’ this piece by fulling it lots:

The colours and the sheen are just gorgeous, so is the softness and drape, even though it’s only a small sample:

Those ridges/crinkles are because I squeezed it in a towel, then hung on the line to dry! If you look at the blue parts you might see a crease along the edge too, it’s such a light piece, the pegs weighed it down and bent it. Here’s a close up:

You can see the differences in sheen and texture when the pieces are next to each other:

This is the soft piece on the template I used, it started out just a bit bigger than the small box it’s on top of:

And the small piece started out the size of the largest outline on the template:

And yep, those are the same template!

Fox Sheep Wool

March 4, 2015 zedster66 Comments 19 comments

I ordered a lot of ‘new to me’ wool from wollknoll recently. I still haven’t had chance to open all the bags and look at them, but I did get a chance to look at a few the other day and make some batts. One of them was listed as ‘Fox Sheep wool‘. I’m guessing it is ‘Coburg Fox Sheep‘. I ordered this as ‘fleece’, which comes as pieces of a carded batt. This what mine looked like:

This is a close up:

And this is what it looked like after I made a batt:

I made a sample about 10 x 10″ and added some black viscope tops:

On the top half I added fluffed/mussed up viscose in various thicknesses and also laid it criss-cross in a couple of places:

On the bottom half, I fanned out the viscose tops:

This is a close up of the middle on the bottom:

And this is the middle of the top:

Whenever I’ve used black viscose it reminds me of ‘bubble painting’ – mixing washing up liquid with kids’ ready mix paint and bubbling it up with straws- but these middle parts remind me of seaweed 🙂 This is a close up of a part where I lay the viscose criss cross:

This is what the whole piece looks like on the back:

I suppose a good description of it would be spongey, but it really looks ‘frothy’ to me!

The staple length was really short and being so springy, it wasn’t easy to get a nice even felt with just a couple of layers as you can see when I hold it up to the window: