Felted pouch

Last November I fell in love with the felted pouch idea from this post by Threadnoodle. I’d bought some hand made crystal runes as a Christmas present for a close friend and had been toying with making some sort of fabric bag to hold them, but this was perfect! And I can post about it now, since Christmas has been and gone.

I started by wrapping a crystal sphere (a child’s ball would be better – not as heavy – but we didn’t have anything the right size) first in a layer of blue fleece which would be the inside of the pod and then in a thick layer of merino and silk  in shades of purple.

The whole parcel was liberally soaked in a solution of olive oil soap flakes and warm water, and then rolled until the fleece felted tightly round the sphere. Then I rinsed it thoroughly and alternately in hot and cold water, to help it felt further before I left it to dry.

Once dry I carefully took the scissors to the top, making five cuts so I could ease the sphere out later. Then I felted it again so the edges of the cuts would felt together and shrink back slightly.

There were some areas I wasn’t too happy with and I also wanted to embellish the surface of the pouch further but wasn’t too sure how I was going to do that, so I put it on one side and let my creative subconscious work on a solution…which came when I was clearing my eldest’s room prior to his return from university.

I bought some needlefelting bits and pieces from eBay a while ago but hadn’t got round to using them. However, my middle one recently had a mad fit of crafting including making a needlefelted dog she had seen in my ‘Mollie Makes’ magazine and used her brother’s room as a studio. She’s very good at getting things out but not so keen on putting them away…

As I packed the needle felting kit away, I realised it was time to use it myself and after a very pleasant evening in front of the television with some roving, beads and extra fleece. I ended up with this:

I ‘patched’ the slightly thinner pieces of the main body of the pouch with swirls of extra purple merino/silk mix and needlefelted around the edges of the top flaps to further stabilise them. Then I needlefelted spirals of golden orange roving all over the outside.

For the closure I needlefelted five pieces of roving to the underside of the top flaps and fed them first through a hexagonal doughnut shaped bead of green agate, then through a round doughnut of mother of pearl and finally a cylindrical felt bead made from the same fleece as the outside of the pouch.

It’s only just big enough to take the rune set, which is a bit annoying, but I loved the needlefelting – will have to do some more of that in the near future – and the most important thing is how much my friend liked the gift.