Category Archives: wet felting

Fourth Quarter Challenge 2015

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I’m still feeling a bit direction-less on this challenge, ambling from one idea to the next but I have at least managed to commit to making a couple of pieces of felt this week, both based on the challenge.

The first is a small hanging based on this photo of some cone flowers (rudbekia):

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My idea for this picture was to use different tones and shades to visually bring some of the flowers forward while sending others into the background.

Using the ball of ochre coloured wool in the middle of this photo I blended some different tones and shades by adding different quantities of white or black.

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And used these batts to make some prefelts:

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I confess I cheated a little – the yellow in the middle is not a tone or shade of the ochre colour, the original colour is the square 2nd from right on the bottom row.

These prefelts were cut up and arranged on a square of black commercial prefelt:

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After lots of rubbing and a little bit of rolling all the pieces are firmly attached and it is ready for some finer details to be added.

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I quite like the jolly, cartoon-like effect but think I can make the flowers look more 3-dimensional with some shading using the left over prefelts and pieces of the batts.

This weekend I also made a start on a hooded jacket, again applying the challenge instruction of using just one colour plus black and white. There’s still some way to go but here is a little taster…

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Rummaging through my stash I found some bundles of carded natural merino batts in white and dark brown, I had an idea that using batts would speed up the layout, which it did, but any time I saved in the initial lay-out was lost needle-felting more wool over the thin spots at the prefelt stage. 🙁

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I attached a hood to my favourite dress resist. Masking tape is great for making temporary changes to resists. You can see where I have permanently altered this resist to add sleeves using duct tape.

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Laying out the wool with some lovely Wensleydale locks for extra texture and some white mulberry silk for a little bit of sheen.

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Starting to layout the front sections:

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With a little luck I hope to post the finished jacket next time.

Challenge Cheat

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This quarter’s challenge from the felting and fibre studio was to dye or blend our colours to match samples from a colour pallet generator. I only had an afternoon this weekend for felting so decided to bend the rules a little. I found a photo I liked in Pinterest and plugged it into a colour pallet generator with this result:

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Instead of blending / dyeing my own colours, I rummaged through my wool stash for the closest colours I could find to pallet of colours above:

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I decided to make something small, a phone case for an iphone I haven’t even bought yet. I know, I’m a little bit mad but when I get an idea in my head I rarely have the patience to be sensible.

Keeping to the flower theme of the original photo, I created a resist based on phone dimensions I found on the web and started laying out my wools and found some scarlet cotton in my scrap bag along with some pieces of hand-dyed prefelt that I thought would work well with this colour pallet (another deviation from the challenge brief).

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This is the nearly finished case, I just need to trim the pocket where the phone will sit, but I will wait for the phone to arrive before I do that final step, even I’m not that brave/stupid/reckless (delete as appropriate).

Here it is drying (front and back):

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I’m already thinking about adding some machine embroidery to the front flap….