wet felted pod – Felting and Fiber Studio

Silk Cocoon

June 24, 2015 zedster66 Comments 22 comments

I’ve been re-organising my supplies lately, and one of the things I did was put my dyed silk products into one box, and my natural undyed silk supplies in another. While I was doing this I had an idea to make a silky cocoon type pod. I had a look on google images and liked the look of ones which were more fibrey, ‘scruffy’ looking. So I started by really piling the silk on to my resist. I added a couple of bunched up silk hankies, a silk hankie I’d drafted into roving, silk throwster’s waste, schappe silk from wollknoll, different types of silk noil, some coccon strippings. I can’t find my undyed silk carrier rods, but I did find a little bag of ‘fluff’ I’d carded from silk carrier rod scraps a few years ago, so I put that on too. I did a layer of 18.5 Mic Merino on top of the silk, then on one side I lay lengths of white pencil roving. I used 23 Mic Merino for the second layer, and then 2 layers of English 56s. I do like the way it turned out, but I didn’t expect it to be so ‘neat’!

I thought with all the silk I’d piled on it’d be a lot more fibrey, but it does have nice texture and structure and there’s a lot of different shades.

This is a closer look at some texture:

And this is some of the throwster’s waste:

I wondered if some of the texture and features would show up more with a light inside, so I used a bit of sewing thread to attach it to a ceiling light to see:

You can definitely see more, and here you can see the ridges from the pencil roving better:

It looks quite creepy with the light in, I think 🙂

Cheesecloth Meets Merino Wool

March 1, 2014 zedster66 Comments 29 comments

Today we have a guest post from Lyn.

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I was lucky to win some of Ruth’s hand-dyed cheesecloth in a recent giveaway post – scrummy isn’t it?

I really liked the pattern in the dark green piece, top left, so I cut a 27cm circle from it, then placed it on top of 2 layers of white merino wool fibres that had been laid out to form a rough, slightly larger circle.

I used white merino so that after the nuno process the colours of the cheesecloth would remain the same, although they would be slightly muted because of the migration of the white fibres.
To reduce the dulling effect of the white fibres, I very carefully shaved the superfluous fibres from the top of the dry nuno felt. Shaving is a tricky process as the ruched fabric can easily be damaged.

I then messy-stitched the piece of flat felt into a rustic bowl. I love this kind of stitching and it’s best described as stitching done with your eyes shut – different coloured threads, short stitches, long stitches and rows of stitches that meander wherever they choose.

I thought the centre of the bowl looked pretty without stitches, but it wanted to buckle a bit, so I cut a circle of stiff, iron-on interfacing – the exact same size as the centre of the bowl – then ironed it to the underneath of the bowl. I used the base of an upturned tall glass tumbler as an ironing board.

The finished rustic bowl:

Nuno felting is an easy way to add interest to a plain item. This pod was made with a 20cm circular resist.

I used four layers of merino wool on each side of the resist, then placed a circle of cheesecloth on the top of the side that would have the hole cut into it.