Wet Felting workshop

It was our monthly SEATA (Scunthorpe Embroidery and Textile Association) meeting on Saturday and we had an all day workshop with Eve Marshall on wet felting, specifically creating flower/garden pictures. Unusually, we all worked through the stages of the process together, rather than having a demonstration and then going off to work at our own rate and it worked extremely well. There were only 16 of us and the (huge) room was warm, bright and almost silent, as we got our heads down and cracked on, which made it extremely calming and mindful experience.

First we made two prefelts, one in shades of pink and the other blues and purples. I forgot to photograph the purple one (I used all of it in my piece), but this is the pink which is so much nicer in real life. It has a much wider and more subtle variety of colours and the light coloured diamond in the middle is a piece of silk hankie, which has a wonderful shimmer.

Then we were given a large piece of green prefelt for our background and some scraps of coloured prefelt to add to the pieces we’d just made before setting about creating our flower piece. I went for alliums. I’ve always loved alliums and some of my earliest work on this blog (go to the side bar and scroll back to May and June 2011) is based on them. After a lot of snipping, I had this laid out on my prefelt.

I did remove the white strips later and then wasn’t sure if that was a good idea, but they were very thin and I was concerned that if they moved during the felting process they would spoil the design. Then I added some more distant flowers, covering some lilac prefelt circles with a handful of the tiny offcuts from my petals with some fleece over the top.

After lunch we had to carefully take all our bits off, which for me was a nightmare, so we could build up the background layers. I used more clumps of my petal offcuts to make some alliums in the further distance.

Ready for the prefelt flowers.

I did my best to replace the central allium as I had had it originally, but I ended up with a whole floret’s worth of six petals left, which I had to fill in somewhere. We also had a little pack of odds and ends of silk and other fibres to add extra texture and colour.

Eve had recommended that we put some fleece over the prefelt areas to encourage it to ‘stick’ together and as I had so many tiny pieces I was concerned about getting the right balance between holding them in place and obscuring the design. Luckily Eve saw what I’d done just before we were due to start the main felting process and dived in to remove that lilac cloud.

Instead, she showed me how to use the tiniest of swirls.

I was so pleased with my design that I really didn’t want to start felting! Soapy water next and given the amount of wet about, this is my last process image.

And the finished piece. I’m mostly pleased. Some of the distance alliums aren’t really visible and the stems have vanished, but I was always intending to stitch into it anyway and hopefully a little judicious embroidery will just redefine some of the fuzzy areas.

It’s also huge for me – at least 30cm square – and I’m thinking that if the embroidery works, I might actually frame it.

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A Felt Collaboration

At the end of my two days at the Artisan Market at The Collection two weeks ago, my lovely neighbour, Lisa, gave me a couple of pieces of hand made felt she had left over from some wet felted vessels, in case I could do anything with them.

I certainly could! I decided to cut the pink piece into a front and back for a mandala brooch and the larger more orangey piece into an abstract shape for a barrette.

I used a variety of oddments for the mandala brooch, starting with a vintage bead cap and bead in the centre of a brass connector from a broken necklace. I added a second round with some more vintage bead caps, seed beads and some little springs which I salvaged from broken earhooks.

I did wonder whether to add a further round but I wanted to show off the felt rather than obscure it, so I stopped there and joined the front to the back (adding a circle of pelmet vilene inside for strength) with a simple beaded blanket stitch.

I’ve not had chance to do anything further with the barrette but I’m thinking of doing couching with some decorative chains… Another fun collaboration and I have a decent sized scrap left over which I can use for other things and some trimmings which I’ll wet felt into some dreadlocks. Nothing goes to waste.

I stitched the ring of leaves for another cauliflower in the block of three I’m planning for the stumpwork garden and while I was doing that I decided to take the French knots out of the one I’d already done. They were not only too white, but more importantly, too flat and even. I need to find a more suitable weight thread to stitch them back in.

And as you can see from the bottom left hand corner of the photo above, I’ve started fuzzing up my carrot tops.

It takes quite a while to carefully undo the twist of the coton a broder threads, so I’ll be saving that job for the next long committee meeting!

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Textile art brooches

It seems odd to be thinking about Christmas in the middle of the summer, but I’m currently in the middle of creating unique upcycled jewellery for various Christmas markets I’m booked into.

First, another felted spiral brooch. I have no idea where the initial felted dreadlock came from for this – it’s an interesting mix of colours that I wouldn’t have thought of putting together.

Once rolled up and stitched I liked it even more.

Finished with a beaded edging that echoes the colours of the felt.

Then with the boro and sashiko work I’ve been doing recently I had the idea of doing a tiny piece with fragments of indigo dyed fabric and a single strand of silk to go into a vintage silver tone brooch. The needle gives an idea of scale – the whole oval is the size of the pad of my thumb.

Finished and mounted in the brooch.

It’s available here in my Etsy shop.

Lastly, another locket insert on silk carrier rods. This originally had a trellis behind it but it was too fussy and the trellis looked like it was hanging in midair, so I carefully unpicked it and am going for just the rose bush.

Still not completely happy with it but it’s getting there. I’m definitely going to try and do more with the boro though.

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Felting Project

We had the OFSTED call this week. That acronym might not mean much to anyone who hasn’t been involved in the British education system but OFSTED carry out school inspections. And anyone who has been involved with them will know that they pretty much sow terror, despair and misery in their wake.

I head up our Nurture/Learning Support team and am also the behaviour specialist so it was decided by senior management that the few hard core behaviour problem children we have in school would be taken out of their various classes and corralled in the Nurture Room where instead of lessons they would do something interesting, arty and creative for the duration of the inspection (a day and a half) under my tender care. What I think about this is pretty much unprintable, but as these six boys are often violent and abusive, no one wanted to risk the outcome of the inspection on one of them kicking off.

So I decided that we would felt. First  I showed them some pieces of handmade felt and demonstrated how to pull tufts of fleece and lay them out in layers to form a big piece of flat felt (about 70cm by 70cm) for the base of the design. They used blue and white fleece to create a stream running diagonally from one corner to the other and I showed them how to ‘paint’ with tiny wisps of different coloured fleece to make pebbles in the stream.

 

Then they added different greens all around the stream for grass and bushes and started to create the felt. While they took turns in pairs to roll the huge sausage of felt, bubble wrap, net curtain and fleece, I started the rest off rolling fleece around small balls to make flowers. Once the fleece had felted tightly around the balls I cut slits into the top to make petal shapes and they carried on rolling, watching the slits become holes and the felt gradually shrink further and further down the balls until they became little tight cup shapes.

The next day they made a piece of green felt about 40cm by 30cm and designed some leaf templates. I cut leaves out of the felt while they added stitches and beads to make the centres of the flowers.

Most of them had never embroidered before so we had to give quite a lot of initial support, but several of the boys really took to it and once all the flowers were done they began to add central veins to the leaves with whipped and threaded running stitch.

Once each element was finished they told me where they wanted them putting and I needlefelted the flowers and leaves in place, which worked brilliantly and was much quicker than stitching!

The finished piece:

They are extremely proud of it and I’m just pleased we managed to keep a powder keg dry for the best part of two days.

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