Cranleigh Show

I spent this Saturday with my local Guild of Spinners Weavers and Dyers on their stand at the Cranleigh Agricultural Show. They have a stand there each year and demonstrate a mixture of spinning and weaving (dyeing is a bit impractical). I went along hoping to sell a few of my felted items and get to know some of the guild members better. I didn’t sell anything but I was taught to spin by the lovely Jo, she made it look so easy and I’m sure I made it look unnecessarily difficult. But in my defence you are trying to control 3 different elements simultaneously (keeping the foot treadle going so it spins in the right direction, thinning out the roving with your right hand while holding and feeding the thinned roving with your left), all far too much for my tiny brain to cope with!

This is the outcome of my labours…. a bit chunky and uneven (I call it “art yarn” ;o) ) but at least it has not unravelled.

Rosemary also attempted to teach me how to use a drop spindle. This was a little easier but my results were a tad disappointing. I clearly need more practice…

Here is our West Surrey Guild of Spinners Weavers and Dyers. You can just about make out a couple of my felt handbags hanging on the back wall of the tent. We were busy like this all day.

And a few more photos from the rest of the show.

Another bonus from this trip was picking up my first fleece to scour and prepare for felting (2 fleeces in fact), I’m afraid I forgot to take pictures while I was working on the first one but here is the second one (a Jacob) all neatly bundled up.

And partially unfolded, the sides are still folded in. The neck of the fleece is on the left. I was rather pleased to find it was mostly white wool (it’s much easier to dye different colours).

I spent this morning cutting off the dags, picking out bits of grass and dead bugs and separating the colours into separate buckets ready for scouring. It was nice (if a bit smelly) to be sitting in the sun playing with my fleeces.

I noticed on my first fleece that I still have small waxy lumps in the fleece even after soaking in detergent overnight and rinsing. Those of you who have scoured your own fleeces – do you have a preferred detergent or method for getting rid of the build up of lanolin?

Gorgeous Goodies

I haven’t had much spare time for felting this week but I did receive this gorgeous bundle of fibre from my blogland friend and fellow Artybird student, Jane Mercer of Takingaturn.

We did a fibre swap after she read my post about sculpting with different breeds and this lovely bundle arrived last weekend. So far I have only been able to make one piece. The purple bag at the bottom of the picture contains Cap Merino, a breed that I have read lots about but as yet not had a chance to play with. I was so excited to be able to try it out. From what I have read I was led to believe it would felt very quickly and form a very firm felt with a smooth (not at all hairy) surface.

Armed with this information I thought I was holding the Holy Grail of wools for sculptural felt so HAD to try making a 3D piece with it.

It didn’t quite felt as I expected, in fact it took a lot longer than most of the wools I had previously tried just to get to the prefelt stage. I was so surprised by this I made the same piece from BFL to see if I was just having an off day, but the Cap Merino took twice as long to felt as the BFL piece below.

Felting time aside, it does have some very nice qualities though, it does form quite a firm felt when compared with conventional merino (it’s not as firm as the coarser wools such as Finnish), and the surface is very smooth and soft. It also forms really nice sharp folds and does hold 3D shapes well.

This is what it looks like before felting, it’s a fine, very short staple fibre with some crimp:

Here is the piece I made (using the same resist template I used for the other sculpture tests).

And the BFL piece (I blended red and blue with a little white silk):

As promised in my last post, I have been playing with crayons and other mark making implements as part of my C&G course, doing this has been a real trip down memory lane, it’s just like being back in art class at primary school ;).  I expect to be using these as design inspiration for felt pieces. They all started out from images of bone cross sections like this.