Category Archives: felt picture

Translucent felt

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As I mentioned in my last post, I have been doing almost obscene amounts of dyeing this week, one batch was for my C&G course and was predominantly focussed on dyeing different animal fibres in the same dye vat (bag in my case) so you end up with a harmonious blend of colours in a range of materials. I chose to use each pair of primary colours so had 3 “vats” and the these are the results.

Each vat contained, Corriedale top, some alpaca top, silk hankies, ponge 5 silk, a piece of commercial prefelt, some merino pencil roving and a piece of hand spun White Faced Woodland.

For good measure I threw in some of my scoured Jacobs fleece too…

The colours are so lovely I kept finding myself standing in the bathroom literally watching them all dry 🙂 Needless to say I couldn’t wait to use them…
Our brief from the course was to create a piece of textured felt using the design work form previous weeks (in my case I had been working with bone micrographs).
I cut out some silk shapes that resembled the holes you see in bone when under the microscope.

And laid resists over the top that were just slightly smaller than the silk.

Then added 2 layers of the corriedale roving, pulling the tufts was lovely as I had different colours with each pull.

I even spun some of the orange/red pencil roving, my spinning is definitely improving but I’m not about to win any prizes for producing beautifully even yarn.

After felting and cutting out the resists.

I’m really pleased with how this piece turned out but it really comes to life when you hold it up to the light:

The corriedale has produced a beautiful crimp and the silks look like stained glass windows. I think this technique would make a stunning lampshade or even curtains.
Here is a closer look at the curly corriedale, this is fast becoming one of my favourite wools to work with:
Now I just need to figure out a way to hang it so it can be hung in front of a window and the frame / hanger does not cast a shadow that would detract from the design….
I also repeated the dyeing a variety of different fibres exercise. Following advice from Ruth I tried some grey and brown too (thanks Ruth). It’s still a bit monochromatic but an improvement on the last version 🙂
Linking up to nina-marie, off the wall Friday

Natural Wool Colours

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This week I have been a good girl (mostly) trying to catch up on my City and Guilds work, there’s been some dyeing of wools and animal fibres and using natural fibre colours. It’s very easy to overlook all the lovely browns, creams and greys that wool naturally comes in when confronted by the vast array of juicy, commercially dyed wools that are so readily available but I hope I can convince you to at least take a second look at the natural colours too….

For the current series of C&G assignments I have been using bone micrographs as my starting point and this piece was no exception. I found this photo on the Microlab Gallery and used it for inspiration. This is a piece of fossilised dinosaur bone as seen under the microscope.

Here are the fibres wetted out ready for rolling, I even used some of my hand-spun Jacob wool for drawing lines (my spinning is still a bit erratic but is getting better and I like the thick and thin effect in this painting).

And the finished piece.

I really like this piece, it is quite heavily textured and I’m finding hard not to stroke it whenever I wander past. I think it looks lonely and needs some companions, so will have to make a few more ;o)

For a related assignment we were also asked to make a piece from just white fibres with the intention of dyeing it so that the different design elements would be revealed as not all fibres accept the dye at the same rate. Here is the piece laid out, ready to be wetted out and rolled:

And before dyeing (not very inspiring!):

And after dyeing:

I’m a little disappointed with this piece, I’m glad I incorporated some vegetable fibre (igneo corn top) which does not accept the acid-fast dyes, the corn top is the only element that has provided a reasonable amount of contrast. All the wools, silks, mohair and alpaca seem to have accepted the dye fairly evenly so the changes in colour are rather subtle. The different textures are nice though. I am tempted to add some embroidery to make it more interesting…..