Category Archives: city and guilds

Carding Fleeces in the Sunshine

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The UK weather is about to take a turn for the worse with the remnants of hurricane Bertha heading our way tomorrow so I have been making the most of the sunshine over the last couple of days and carding my White-faced Woodland (WFW) and Jacob fleeces outside.

I have been making a few rolags to try on my new drop spindle too:

And I made a felt sample from the WFW:

This is quite a coarse, hairy wool, definitely not a good choice for scarves but has lots of potential for slippers and handbags. Its shrinkage rate was 40%.

Those of you on the Felting and Fibre Studio Forum may recall I was looking to join a felt-making or other textile group a few months back and I think I may have found one through the International Feltmakers Association. It’s not particularly close (they meet in a village hall an hour’s drive away) but I am hopeful it will be worth the effort and they only meet once per month. Their next meeting is tomorrow – wish me luck!

With my City and Guilds course nearing an end I have also taken the plunge and signed up to a couple of workshops in addition to a 1-week contemporary weaving course I signed up to in May. Fiona Duthie’s Surface Design workshop starts at the start of September and runs for 6 weeks, then I have Karoliina Arvilommi‘s workshop in the middle of September and Tim Johnson’s weaving workshop at the end of the month. I am hoping that I can use Tim’s techniques to incorporate felt and textiles into some contemporary basket weaving. September is already shaping up to be a busy month! Exciting times 🙂

Gorgeous Goodies

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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.