Category Archives: wet felt

Laminating painted fabrics

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I have been laminating the fabric painted and printed for my City and Guilds course. Most have been successful, the only one that really gave me trouble was the polyester, despite rolling for 30 min it still only attached in a few small areas. I’m not sure whether this will be seen as cheating or being innovative but after the third attempt I decided to try another tack; stitching to prefelt before felting.

This is what it looked like before felting:

And after:

These are the other printed and painted fabrics I laminated:
The organza was much more successful and I think the sheen on it is much prettier

Silk chiffon, this one resulted in the least puckering and the truest representation of the original design

Cotton muslin with carded top behind, this one has some lovely puckering that compliments the painted design:

Cotton scrim – I think the green merino has worked much better than the white as a backdrop for the monoprint.

This was the piece of cotton muslin with the glitter and 3D paints, the bronze 3D paint worked remarkably well but the glitter has lost some of its intensity during felting.

Fabric paper lamination

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Last week Ruth Lane blogged about her experiences of experimenting with paper lamination, it was so inspirational I immediately bought a tub of gel medium, I couldn’t wait to try it!

The medium arrived yesterday, so I have been busily following Ruth’s instructions, this is how I got on…
I experimented with 4 different papers and using some stencils I had to hand, painting the medium on with a stiff paint brush.

Glitter paper:
Metallic green paper:

Red card:

Handmade paper with tea leaves (this is after soaking as you could not see the stencilling in the photo taken before):

These are the results after soaking and removing the excess paper…
The glitter paper

 The metallic paper, this stencil kept moving so it is not very well defined and looks rather scruffy:
I think the ladybugs on the red card have worked the best of all the stencils, perhaps the others are bit too detailed and the detail was lost (mostly due to my ineptitude with using stencils).

I also had a go at nuno felting a couple of them, I love how the glitter paper has turned out, the organza has ruffled beautifully and both the organza and the glitter catch the light in different ways, I’m afraid my photos don’t do the glitter paper justice, but it really is very shimmery. I will definitely do this again.

The nuno felted lady bugs are pretty cool too and offered some additional learnings:

  • I half expected this to happen, but where there are large areas of the gel medium (the heads) the felt has not attached so well.
  • I’m not sure why but the paper has almost completely rubbed off the one on the right, leaving just the gel medium (which also looks nice) the other 2 are fine. I expect this may be avoided by felting with the organza side facing away from the felt so the paper remains protected. 

 Have you tried this technique? How did you get on?