Author Archives: Teri Berry

The Aliens Are Coming!

Alright, of course I am teasing, but Mr TB has nicknamed my latest offering the “Alien Signpost”. This is by far the largest piece of felt I have ever made, it was about 1.5 x 1.2 m (5 ft x 4 ft) when first laid out. It has proved to be quite a challenge, firstly just reaching the middle to lay out the surface decoration but also when trying to move it / roll it up, it was just such handful!

It also took an incredibly long time to lay out the design too, about 8 hours including the time it took to card the wools for the background.

When finished it will be a felt hanging and was based on a monoprint I made on some handmade paper last year.

It is still at the prefelt stage, I allowed it to dry out so I could deal with a couple of prefelts that weren’t adhering as strongly as I would like and needle felt some finer details before fulling. This is what it currently looks like:
I am expecting the colours to become muted during fulling as the paler background colours migrate to the front.

Textile Bowl and the Finished Apron

I adapted Ruth Lane’s felt scrap bowl tutorial to include a piece of hand-dyed cotton scrim to make a small textile bowl from felt and fabric scraps. The method involves laying out your fabric scraps on a piece of water-soluble fabric (WSF), creating a sandwich by adding a second piece of WSF, pinning it together and using free-motion embroidery all over it so that all the pieces of fabric are stitched together. Here is my layout (scrim on the botttom, then WSF with felt and fabric scraps – I put another sheet of WSF on top of this):

Here is the finished bowl after wetting out the WSF and leaving it to dry over another bowl:

I most like how the scrim has solidified and looks like water splashing up from the surface of a pond.

I am really pleased with how the apron turned out, all those hours applying wax were worth it in the end! It’s not very obvious from the photo but there are lots of pale greens and blue still visible from the original rainbow dyeing. The label said it was 100% cotton but clearly the waist straps aren’t. I have sprayed it with clear plasti-drip to water-proof it and hope to find out on Sunday if that has worked…

And a close up:

Linking up to nina-marie, off the wall Friday