Author Archives: Teri Berry

Little Germs

Those of you from the UK may remember an NHS campaign during the last flu outbreak:

This got me thinking, what if I could make a tissue holder / dispenser in the form of a germ? I  know it’s silly but this idea of brightly coloured “germs” dispensing the tissues that will be their demise still amuses me :o)

Germs have a “bad rap” for being nasty but they’re not all bad and some of them can be funny too – take this little guy…

I decided to use a resist method to create my germ and decorate it with shapes cut from prefelts in contrasting colours. I ended up making 2 resists, one oblong, that will be just large enough to take a packet of tissues and the second the same as the first but with semi-circles on the ends to give it more of bacillus (a type of bacteria) shape.

Green seemed like the obvious choice of colour, after all snot is green… Red or purple for the spots? I had some scraps of red prefelt after cutting lots of leaf shapes for a shawl I have been working on, so red it was.

The smaller resist has definitely worked best, the second resist is more suited to a glasses case, it is just too long for a packet of tissues.

I might try adding appendages to the next one… perhaps a curly flagellum? or some spikes or bumps over the surface?

More adventures in shibori

I also made another piece using stitching and gathering to provide a resist against the dye. This time I used a sewing machine to stitch parallel lines before tightly gathering the fabric. As with other piece, when I use this method again I will hand stitch, removing the machine stitching from gathered material was a real pain.

This piece was dyed at the same time as the “circles” shibori, again I removed the stitching while it was still wet. This is the result:

As you can see my stitching was less straight towards the bottom but I think the effect is still lovely.

This piece also became a book cover, first I stitched a couple of pleats into the fabric to add extra texture to the final fabric.

Then I laid out white merino top along the pale purple lines to maintain the contrast.

Before laying out 2 layers of merino top.

Here it is after felting, with the pleats giving added texture.

And the final product – an A4 book cover: