It’s a wet Bank Holiday in Lincolnshire and to cap it off I am full of cold so doing a bit of felting in between the hot drinks and sniffles! These Merino purses, made with a resist, are an ideal size for glasses cases and a good way to use up oddments of fibres which I seem to have a lot of. I’ve embellished them with tiny bits of silk, sari waste and more Merino and finished off with a button closure.
Merino Wool Purses, ideal for use as a glasses case.
Theres nothing on TV so I’m busy making items for the Cranwell Group sales table which will be happening at our exhibition in July. I found the pattern for these little teapot pincushions in a book entitled “Omiyage” by Kumiko Sudo. They are quick and easy to create using fabric scraps and polystyrene balls and they make a fun gift for anyone who is keen on sewing.
Teapot pincushions.
Omiyage is crammed with wonderful ideas and patterns to make your own Japanese style gifts.
I’ve just made an experimental piece as I wanted to answer a friend’s question which was “will PVA stiffen felt”? I created a very quick wet felted bowl using a single layer of grey Norwegian wool which was lightly felted and then soaked in a 50/50 solution of PVA and water. It was placed over an upturned glass bowl until it dried out. It isn’t rock hard but certainly stiff enough to give it some body. I can’t say that I particularly like it as a finished piece, so it will probably get washed out and recycled, but the PVA did its job so my friend got their answer and I’ve learnt something for future use.
Wet felted Norwegian wool bowl
The wet felted octopus is finished and there’s just enough of the afternoon left to get outside with the dog and enjoy the weather.
The body and tentacles are joined and work started on the eyes
The body had been felted so hard I broke 5 needles working on him this afternoon!
Five broken needles later…….
All washed up……..if only we lived at the coast!
Which way to the sea?
The octopod is on its way to becoming a fully fledged octopus once I get his body dried out and somehow attach it to the tentacles. Looking at images of these creatures I’ve got some work to do making bulging eyes before I attempt the joining of the two parts. I’ve photographed him on the resist I used for the body to show the amount of shrinkage involved. Having spent longer than usual on the felting and fulling its resulted in the thickest, toughest piece of felt I have made so far.
Yesterday I decided to make another vessel, along the lines of my yellow and grey one, but this time I wanted a simpler, more rounded finish.
I started by making several strips of green Merino, wet felted (very lightly) onto organza.
By laying a sheet of Lutradur over a piece of Vilene and applying paint, the paint soaked through and gave me two options to use as the body of the vessel.
I chose to work with the Vilene and attached the felt and organza by machine before using a soldering iron to make cutouts.
This is the finished vessel.
A few weeks back I read Ruth’s review on the Felting and Fibre Studio about the fascinating wet felted items that members had created using a “book resist”. I’d never heard this term before but when I read the Book Resist Tutorial by Teri it all made sense and I realised how a lot of the 3D items I had seen previously in exhibitions and on-line had been made. Wet felting with a book resist opens up new possibilities allowing you to create seamless complex shapes in one piece.
I was particularly interested in the amazing octopod. I am planning to make an explorers outfit for the Asylum Steam Punk Festival in August and a felted octopus could be one of my accessories…..maybe draped over a shoulder or clinging to the skirt!
Unfortunately I got so carried away with the felting I forgot to photograph the resist before covering it. It had to be cut to remove it but this shows you roughly how it looked. It was made from 4 sheets of A4 acetate, cut into 8 sections and sewn together in the centre as a “book”.
resist made from A4 acetate sheets
Each section was covered in turn with three layers of varying shades of yellow Merino and gently rubbed.
covering the resist with Merino
prior to removing the resist
resisit removed and rolling complete
After removing the resist the octopod was rolled, rubbed and thrown around to finish the felting process. The tentacles are now done but I will add a wet felted body later in the week to take him from octopod to octopus.
the finished octopod waitng for a body
Once again I am back to playing catch up with projects and posts. I’ve been feeling pretty down and lethargic over recent months, for reasons I won’t go into on here, but the year is fast coming to a close and it’s time to give myself a good shake up and get back to normal.
So the first project to feature is one I did as a result of being invited down to London to stay with my niece and her husband at the end of November. They have recently moved house and I got a request to make a pair of Roman blinds for their new study…….what better excuse could there be for a week in London? Sophie chose a lightweight dress fabric for the blinds, which give me a little concern as I wasn’t sure how well they would hang. It wasn’t the easiest fabric to work with but once they had been lined I needn’t have worried as they turned out fine and thankfully they are both delighted with them.
The second project was this years “ugly” fabric challenge with Sitting Ducks. Each year, just before Christmas, one of our members supplies us all with an A4 size piece of fabric (which we probably would never have chosen to use ourselves) and we have to make something with it. After a couple of weeks of wondering what to do with my green and orange crocodiles, and knowing that I wanted to completely disguise the pattern, I finally hit on an idea and Griselda was born. She stands 17″ tall, has a wire frame with a needle felted body and fabric wrapped legs & arms. I added three colours of netting as “wings” to make her into an Autumnal fairy. I had intended to make her face from fabric but realised, the night before we were due to hand in our pieces, that if I was going to get her finished in time I needed a quicker solution for her face, hence the air dry clay.
Although no-one said anything out loud, once we had all placed our work on the table it dawned on me that mine was the odd one out as Sitting Ducks is actually a “quilting” group. Hey, ho………I had fun making her anyway!
Today I joined 8 other felting enthusiasts at the Village Hall in Hutton Buscle near Scarborough for Jenny Peppers “Avanced Pods” workshop. I love Jenny’s classes, she’s a great tutor and explains/demonstrates every step very clearly as we work through our creations.
Two examples of Jenny’s work displayed with the shells which were her inspiration.
We all started out with the same size/shape resist and selected our colours from the huge stash of Merino wool on offer. We began by making a sheet of prefect using three different colours and this would be used to make “craters” in our pods. Working with our prefelts and resists we started with our inner layer and worked outwards, layering our wool tops before adding the spikes and tails.
My resist is wrapped in white Merino and the spikes attached at either end.
The top craters and embellishments are added to my piece.
The next stage was to place our outer craters where we wanted them and add silks, wools, snippets of prefelt, etc as embellishment before felting our spikes.
After lots of rubbing the dreaded rolling begins……and Jenny sees to it that her students don’t skint on the rolling!
Rolling, rolling and more rolling…..
Once again the company was great and day past very quickly with Jenny on hand to encourage, inform and see to it that we all manage to complete our work on time.
Two of the ladies had to leave early and unfortunately I didn’t get pictures of their finished work but here are the other seven.
Detail of my finished pod.
Last weekend a friend and I drove down to Knebworth to see the “Artists in Residence” at Artvango. It was my first visit and turned out to be a really worthwhile day. The three textile artists demonstrating their skills were Clare Bullock (Feltmaker), Sharon Osbourne (Mixed Media) and Lynda Monk (Thermofax). Not only was it interesting to watch these artists at work but it was wonderful how they were so enthusiastic to share their advice and tips so freely.
While I was there I had my grey/lemon vessel in mind and within the first two minutes of arriving Clare had given me the answer to a problem I was having using synthetic organza with Merino tops. I wanted to include the organza as a another texture but I’d found that my fibres were not migrating through the fabric enough to bond the two together. Clare explained that using a very thin layer of fibres and rubbing, not rolling, was the best way to approach it, and it worked. Thanks for that Clare.
In another part of the studio Lynda Monk was demonstrating her use of Thermofax screens and expanding foam on leaf and hexagon shapes cut from Lutradur. What I found interesting was the fact that the wire she was using to give the leaves their shape wasn’t silver or copper coloured like I had in my workroom, Lynda’s wire was covered with white cotton. She explained that she uses this so it can be died to match whatever she is making. Call me sad but I hadn’t seen this stuff before and I was so excited I had to buy some! That was vessel problem two sorted. How to hide the wire? Colour it grey and lemon.
Opposite Lynda was Sharon Osbourne with the most wonderful collection of mixed media work on dispay. Sharon was demonstrating the use of wax crayons with rubbing plates to create patterns on fabric, the crayon is then sealed with a medium. I was standing next to another lady who, like me, works with LD students and we both agreed that having spoken to Sharon we were coming away with several ideas that we could use in future workshops. A couple of days later I tried the wax crayon technique at one of the care homes where I do craft sessions with LD adults and they loved it!
Anyway, back to the 3d piece. It’s now finished, compete with coloured wire, organza and felting. I decided that using all 3 panels would result in a vessel too large for the space I wanted to put it so I only used two of them. Once the machine stitching was finished the holes were burnt out using a soldering iron and hand stitching was added across the larger openings. The cotton covered wire was coloured to match the panels and sewn in place using zigzag stitching. I’m really happy with how this has turned out and it’s something I would definitely like to do more of, particularly incorporating felting into my work and continuing with a more abstract theme.
Finished vessel with the felted bowl which, along with the Flower Tower, provided the initial inspiration.
Detail showing the silver coloured organza.
Close up showing the burnt out sections which have been decorated with hand sewn threads.
Lincs In Stitches 
