Category Archives: felt pod

Monstrous Felting Retreat

Weyfest 2016

What a weekend! I have attended Weyfest with the West Surrey Guild of Spinners Weavers and Dyers for the last 3 years and it is always a very special event, a wonderfully eclectic mix of people, children and dogs with music provided by bands that I grew up listening to (Boomtown Rats, Big Country, Bad Manners…). It is located on the site of the Rural Life Museum in Tilford and normally I demonstrate / teach spinning with a drop spindle, while I am very happy teaching, watching complete novices learn to spin I have to confess I’m not much of a spinner 😉

This year we did something a little bit different, I was let loose on the unsuspecting public with my felting equipment and I was in my element 🙂 The first question was what could a beginner make in a short space of time? I considered flowers but decided that would require a fairly skilled layout…. What about a small picture / a coaster? Then I thought of pods, but would they be too difficult for a beginner?

She didn’t know it but Paula was my guinea pig, she had never made any felt before but did an amazing job, I was so impressed with what she made I took the plunge and made pods with everyone.

My next visitors were Phoebe and Jemima with 2 more fabulous pods…

There were a couple more visitors on Saturday, including a young lady of only 4 years, who made a felt coaster but I’m afraid I didn’t get photos.

After a good night’s sleep (I slept like a log) we did it all again on Sunday…

First up were 2 mother and daughter teams, Donna and Olivia, Ava and Helen. It’s hard to believe but Ava is only 6 and made a fabulous heart shaped pod. Didn’t she do well?

In the afternoon we had Fiona, Vanessa and Sue pictured below and Sandetti and Niamh (who were under 18 and did not have a parent who I could ask permission to post their photos). Again, 5 more amazing pods and very happy customers!

What did I learn? Several people commented on how glad they were to make something functional, and I was surprised at how forgiving felt pods are too make, a couple of the youngsters had a very thick layout but the finished pods were fine, just very sturdy!

I hope we can do something similar next year, perhaps offering a phone / glasses case for some of the sessions as an alternative to the pods.

Finally, a couple of photos from my brief excursions to see the rest of the festival between teaching sessions:

Adding Dimension

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This quarter, the FFS challenge is to add dimension to our felt, on the face of it I should find this challenge easy, almost everything I make is 3D in nature but that rather seems to defeat the purpose, after all, surely a challenge should be just that! 🙂

Last weekend I had a mini epiphany; I really like the effect of shibori felt like the brooch below but using the “tie in a stone/button/marble technique” is not very practical when you are creating a 3D object over a resist as you need extra felt to stretch over the inclusions and it invariably makes the surrounding felt uneven too. I woke up on Sunday morning and my first thought was to create these cup shapes separately and then attach them to the main piece of felt. Is it really sad that I am now dreaming about felt?

This was the piece made with the separate resists. It was very slow work making these 7 little cups and I’m not sure I will use this method a lot but it was interesting to try and I’m happy with the result.

This box is quite large, just shy of a foot square and 5 inches tall.

I wanted to make a small bowl inspired by this pine cone, it started out as a bowl but I clearly wasn’t concentrating while laying out the flaps and spikes so it became a pod instead… 🙂

Finally, I started working on a new vest top that I have been thinking about since attending a dress-making course with Cristina Pacciani at the beginning of July, it still needs some shaping in the back and around the collar but you can already see all the texture from the silk and felt ropes laid under the silk. Originally I was going to make this in royal blue chiffon but then decided white habouti would better showcase the different textures.

What are you planning for the 3rd quarter challenge?

Relief at last!

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After a couple of weeks religiously working on the concertina hat class tutorials I finally gave myself a few hours off to make some felt and (excuse the pun) it felt so good! 🙂 The response to the hat class has been overwhelming, we only started advertising on Friday and already we are down to the last 5 spaces! Thank you to everyone who has shown an interest and/ or shared the link. If you are considering joining this class you might want to hop over to the FFS site ASAP. That said, if you miss out this time, don’t worry, the response has been so great we are already talking about running this class again towards the end of the year or early 2017.

Anyway, back to the felt… 🙂

The observant among you will notice that this hat is also based on the concertina theme,

Front

Side

Back

Ram-bling on

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My other half is currently stuck in Toulouse, France, thanks to the almost weekly strikes that see all flights in and out of the country grounded (grrrr), it’s incredibly frustrating but it does mean I can play with my unwashed fleeces without complaints about the “sheepy smell” pervading the whole house 😉

Yesterday and today were spent working on a new ram hat, I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something about this one reminds me of black nosed Valais, may favourite breed of sheep, they are so cute I defy anyone to not love them:

Valais Blacknose Sheep Swiss Breed - herd

Image from http://www.lazerhorse.org/2014/05/08/valais-blacknose-sheep/

Every time I pass this new hat I have to give it a little pat on the head 🙂

I have also been playing with some wool that came as a free “goody bag” from World of Wool, to be honest, the first one is not colours I would have chosen myself but I was curious to see what the pink and green stripey wool would look like when felted… it is a lot better than I expected!

Cell Morphology

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Last week I started exploring binding techniques for a new wall hanging I have in mind, my idea is to create a confluent layer of cells, organically spreading across the wall, this was my first experiment, the pods were made individually and attached to thin layer of felt to join them together:

In this version all the resists were covered in a single layer of wool on each side, as predicted, serveral of the “pods” have merged into one mega pod with several holes:

This layout was much quicker and the resulting effect is much more amorphous – the individual pods blend almost seamlessly into each other.

My final experiment was a blend of the 2 methods above, the resists were individually covered with black wool before covering all of them in a continuous layer of green wool.

While the pods are less discrete than in the first experiment, the individual forms are more defined than in the second experiment.

I’m leaning towards the technique from first test sample for the final piece, simply because it lends itself towards using a different coloured base and it will be much easier to make “accent” cells of a different colour.

What do you think? Which version would you prefer to see?

Easter Weekend

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I love the long holiday weekends and Easter, with both the Friday and the Monday off is the best of all, a whole 4 days to do with as I please, and invariably that means textiles!

I’ve had my fingers in lots of different textile pies this week:

A new nuno dress (photos of that later – it is nearly finished so won’t be too long to wait).

My first attempt at a tailored jacket, I love everything about it except for the collar reveal, it’s all lumpy and misshapen and I can’t figure out why… it will be accompanying me to my dress-making class, hopefully the tutor can explain what I have done wrong and, more importantly, how to put it right.

Back in the felt world, I made a new lacy scarf and, while I was dyeing this, I put in a few pieces of prefelt, I’m debating on cutting up the prefelt to make nuno scarves with geometric designs.

I am finding myself drawn back into the beauty of the microscopic world (in part thanks to pinterest) and have been developing an idea for a 3D representation of a carpet of cells. I am thinking a series of small pods, the interiors will be black so that when I cut an opening they will appear to have nuclei. The question is, how to join them together? I have 3 or 4 ideas on how I might achieve this. This is my first test piece…

I’m ashamed to say I have been procrastinating terribly over posting my work on Etsy for the last few of months to the point where I have a box full of work now waiting to be listed. However, I have been making amends this weekend and photographed 80% of it, now I just need to make myself sit down and write the descriptions and titles. Definitely a job to be done in front of the TV with a glass of wine in hand! 🙂

What have you been up to this weekend?

Guildford Soroptomists

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If you are anything like me you are probably thinking “soropto-what?”

I first encountered the soropotmists through a friend’s post on Facebook a few weeks ago and promptly went off to look them up. It turns out they are a charitable organisation focussed on empowering and enabling women across the globe. While the Western world has seen the benefits of the suffragette movement and decades of feminism, although we may sometimes feel less valued than our male counterparts, there are dozens of countries where women really are still treated as second class citizens and the soroptomists have made it their goal to help these women.

If you would like to know more about the soroptomists you can access their website here.

Purely by accident, I was looking through listings of upcoming craft fairs trying to identify the ones that I would like to attend and noticed that the Guildford soroptomists are organising a fair in a village hall not too far from here. Their table price is a little more than I would usually pay but when I discovered the proceeds from this fair are going towards the Ebola crisis in West Africa, it was a no-brainer for me.

If you are in the area I would love to see you there, approx 30 stallholders selling home made food and gifts will be there supporting this cause:

10 am to 4 pm Sat 29th Nov at, Cranleigh Village Hall, High St, Cranleigh, Surrey GU6 8AF

On a more light-hearted note, I shared this picture with you last time and asked what you thought it might be:

Ruth was the closest, it is indeed a pod. I had some hand-dyed silk left over after completing my dress a couple of weeks ago and it was so pretty I wanted to use it rather than resign it to my inspiration bag. I settled on making a decorated pod. This is the result, it’s about 25 cm (10″) across:

Give Aways!!

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To promote the launch of my new Facebook page I have decided to offer the chance to win a £20 (approx 30USD) voucher to spend in my Etsy shop as a thank you to everyone who has helped to spread the word. I will hold the prize draw when the number of likes reaches 100. It has already reached 13 with no promotion so I’m hopeful it will get to 100 within a couple of weeks and the lucky winner can use their voucher for a Christmas splurge.

To enter all you need to do is:

like my FB page (click here)
Share the “Give Away!!” post on your FB timeline

The winner will be drawn at random when it reaches 100 likes. GOOD LUCK!!

And another Give Away – TextileArt.org are offering 10 of their favourite textile art books for free, just follow this link to enter.

Onto more woolly matters… 😉

This is the finished “sea creature” bowl I posted a picture of last time, I used the dyeing technique in this tutorial to created the colour graduations. The bowl was made using a combination of multi-layered resists, adding flaps of prefelt and stitching during the felting process. It was a bit of an experiment to put all 3 techniques together so I’m really happy that it has turned out so well.

I confess I made this scarf a couple of weeks ago but have only just found time to photograph it, it is some rainbow dyed habouti 5 silk with merino nuno accents. The silk catches the light beautifully but you will have to take my word for that – I just can’t seem to get sheen or metallic shine to show up in photos – can you?

The show at the Rural Life Museum was fun but not particularly lucrative, but all the other traders were lovely and there were some really interesting customers including one lady who my heart went out to; she struggled to find gifts for her overly discerning (and IMHO ungrateful) mother so had changed tack and was now buying gifts that she would like to receive in the hope that it would be regifted back to her. I think she has the patience of a saint, I don’t know that I would tolerate that sort of behaviour – I certainly wouldn’t continue to buy gifts for them!

Blog Centenary

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The last few weeks have seen quite a run of achievements for me, this blog reached its first birthday at the end of October, last weekend my City and Guilds certificates arrived, and today this blog has reached its 100th post.

It seems quite fitting that this post should be about another milestone; my first felted dress. Being a nuno felt dress the template was HUGE, 1 m wide by 2 m long, forcing me to work on the floor. Not something I like to do as I ache for days after spending all day crawling around on all fours.

The dress didn’t quite go to plan, no matter how much I rolled and worked them the shoulder straps were still far too long so I resorted to cutting them down and sewing seams across the shoulders. Here it is drying on the mannequin.