felt dress | Teri Berry Textiles

Last weekend I started work on a long-sleeved top, Galina (aka Felicity) very helpfully suggested this site on the Felting and Fibre Forum as a possible solution to the “baggy armpit” problem I encountered with my jacket.

It looked like an interesting approach so I gave it a go.

laying out the first layer of roving over some dyed cotton scrim

Adding the sleeves

This was where it started to become challenging, although I had laid out the wool on the inside of the sleeve before laying it on the body, I had to carefully fold plastic between the layers of wool, cotton and resist to prevent the front of the sleeve felting to the back and closing the armholes.

Adding some prefelt kittens

The colour of the wool reminded me of the light you get at twilight so I added some playful kitten silhouettes. By adding the black trim along the bottom this longish top became a short dress but I think it looks great with a pair of black leggings and knee-high boots.

This is the wool I used, it contains a small amount of white tussah silk so the finished dress has a subtle sheen to it.

The new sleeve method didn’t really work as planned; there were several holes where the sleeves joined the body when I first remove the resist. Not a big problem, a little bit of needle felting soon resolved that.

No matter how much I worked and fulled the armpits the arm holes were ENORMOUS. I had to resort to lots of tucks and darts to make the dress fit. It was a lot more work than I expected but I think it was worth it in the end and the colour is a delightful bluish purple.

All is not lost though, Nada posted another option for making sleeves on the forum, so that will keep me out of mischief over Crimbo 🙂

My wool order finally arrived today, it should have been here on Wednesday but it appears the Interlink drivers aren’t capable of following their sat navs. Interlink have a really nice system where you can watch your driver going from drop to drop as it counts down to your delivery. For 2 days running I watched the driver come within 50 yards of my address only to click “cannot deliver / cannot locate address”. Utterly exasperating!!! I can’t help but wonder if he was behind schedule so couldn’t be bothered to stop?

Anyway, here is my bag of woolly goodness 🙂

The large white bags are merino and corriedale top, most of which I plan to dye, above them are some commercial merino and silk blends, a bit of a novelty for me as I normally blend my own. The dark grey in the centre is Gotland, it always amazes me how heavy and dense Gotland is, this parcel is 500g, most of the others are only 200g but are a similar volume.

I have already started to play with some of the merino/silk blends, I chose the purple-blue mix for starters:

And have been laying out over some cotton scrim I dyed yesterday:

I am trying out a new design for the sleeve attachments after making a jacket last week. If it doesn’t work this top will go from being long-sleeved to a vest 🙂

This is the jacket, I love it and have worn it every day this week but feel there is a bit too much fabric in the armpits, while this allows great freedom of movement I think it looks a bit bulky when my arms are down, hence the experiment to find alternative designs.