felt hat | Teri Berry Textiles

Fiona Duthie recently posted a challenge to the Surface Design Online Facebook group page, asking us to use trees as our inspiration and make a felt piece using one or more of the techniques from the SDO course.

I am very fortunate to have a wood just over the road from my home, I walk through it most days and the tree species are primarily silver birch, oak and pine. The rough texture of the oak bark particularly caught my attention and was my inspiration for this hat.

Because I used up some prefelt I dyed last year, I think this hat also qualifies for the Felting and Fiber Forum 2nd Quarter challenge to do some stash-busting / recycling. This was the rather uninspiring piece of prefelt, I don’t think it takes too much imagination to see why it waited so long before finding a good use…

Two challenges achieved with a single hat 🙂

This is another hat I have been working on for Fiona’s challenge:

And my other half broke an axe a couple of weeks ago, I am currently working on a bag that will use part of the broken handle for the bag handle – another entry for the FFF challenge 🙂 More on that in a future post…

Workshop number 3 and it is still only May! I have been very naughty and signed up for another too… with Rutsuko Sakata in early June, and that will be followed by Christina Pacciani in July. I really need to stop but they are so much fun! 🙂

Heidi Grebb’s workshop was probably the hardest I have worked on felt in a long while, we spent 3 incredibly long (9 am to 6 or 7 pm) days and carried on with homework in the evening, she is a teaching machine! Despite our herculean efforts only one of us (Janine) managed to finish her waistcoat before we had to leave. I finished mine at home last week.

The main focus of the workshop was to make a furry felt garment, using locks to add texture but we also spent a lot of time learning how to take a favourite piece of clothing and scaling it up to make a felt piece that will shrink to the right size. Heidi also had an interesting method for assembling your work from flat panels to make a seamless, 3 dimensional garment without using a resist.

This is my finished bolero jacket:

Although I love the colour and the texture I’m afraid it does not fit me very well 🙁 I guess I will just have to have another go!

This week I have been playing with snails again. What do you think, are the extra rings on his shell and the lip for the bottom of his shell an improvement or should I stick with the original design?