Wet Felting Fun and Give Away Extension

Last week I ahd a wonderful opportunity to have a private Wet Felting Tutorial with April, one of my Fiber Arts Guild friends. April does amazing felting of all sorts and I had helped her jump into a collage project so she graciously offered to help me get" wet" with wet felting!! I am sooo in love with what is happening in the fiber arts world lately with the use of the embellishing machine and wet felting. There are several artistis that I have become aware of recently who are doing wonderful things with color and technique and creations that I just adore. Here are some links to explore: Elizabeth Armstrong, Margo Duke, and Jackie. Jackie just had a feature article in the latest Quilting Arts Magazine!!

So to begin, April showed me how to separate the layers of a silk hankie. This would serve as my first layer of my felted piece. I had recieved this wonderful piece of silk luciousness from my dear friend Jacky from OZ, for my last birthday and I was saving it for something special. Truth be told, I did not know how to use it to get the most from it and I surely did not want to waste it. It turns out atht a silk hankie is the silk from a single coccoon that has been hand stretched over a persons hand, into a square. My particiular hankie had 6 layers to it!!! Bonus!!! It is hard to image that all of the lucious fiber contained in one hankie is the doings of one very busy little worm!!!!! Just blows the mind!! Anyway, we put down the silk layer on top of shelf lining that April had purchased at IKEA. We sprinkled the silk with soapy water. This matting (shelf lining) is clear on the back side and has little bumps on the felting or up side. These little bumps make the perfect surface for wet felting as the wool is aggitated gently along the bumps and the fibers are encouraged to hook up with each other. Then we continued to lay down fibers of wool and even some sari silk yarn, in colors that I wanted to work with. Below you see a detail shot of what I was doing.

After the color paly was complete we covered the entire piece with shocking pink roving that we teased apart. I had come into a large quantity of this wool from a friend who had decided that it hurt her head to work with the stuff!!
Then we strinkled with some more soapy water and covered the wool with a layer of bubble wrap. Where oh where would we artists be without our bubble wrap??????

Then we rolled the whole thing up into a nice fat sausage and started rolling and turning and rolling the piece some more.
Here you can see how nice it is to have the shelf liner have a clear side!!

So the rolling was finished and then we worked on tightening up the egdes of the panel by using our hands, some more soapy water and rubbing the fibers against the bumpy surface of the shelf liner.

The next step was the hot water rinse and squeeze and then cold water rinse, hot water rinse and squeeze. We were done.!!!! I love this piece and I am not sure what it will become- probably several pieces- you WILL be seeing it again!!!

I just love this process and I can see putting the kids to work over the summer helping me to roll some more felt pieces!!!!

Give Away Extension

As I am holding my art giveaway to celebrate my 300th post , I think taht it is only right to extend the comment period till I actually post my 300th post, don't you!!

Therefore I will continue to collect comments till one day following my 300th post. this current post is #299. Those that leave more than one comment in this entire time period will be entered according to the number of comments left!! I just love getting comments!!

Hugs!!

Update: Finished Projects

I have gotten around to finishing my pink wool felted scarf that I first blogged about here. I added beads for some extra sparkle and took more photos in an attempt to catch the glimmer and sparkle that the Angelina fiber adds to the piece. I was not particularly happy with the length of the piece. It seems too short to me and it is a bit too wide. but I decided to wear it today as I was traveling into D.C for a lunch date and it was really cold. I pinned it around my neck with one of my favorite silver pins that was my grandmothers and it kept me sooo warm! I got lots of compliments from total strangers!! Love it when that happens.

In these next photos You can really see the glittery effect of the Angelina fibers that I trapped within the wool curls.

And here is the purple and red scarf at the stitching stage before washing off the soluble fabric.

I stitched heart shapes going every which way all over the wool with shiney purple thread. Once I had wet felted the piece and dried it, it looked like this:

I am really thrilled with how this one turned out and it is longer by about 18 inches and only 5 inches wide. I do think that I am going to add a sprinkling of red and purple beads in random spots because that really turns up the interest and the glitz. This scarf will be for sale at The Liberty Town Emporium at the end of this week.

I have also started and finished a very quick embellishing project that will be swapped on the Creative Threads Yahoo group. As I found that I was far too involved in too many swaps and I quit all of my groups, now I find that i really miss a little bit of swapping activity and the fun of getting amazing art pieces in the mail. So I joined this group and I am keeping a very restrained hand on my committments. This swap was for a padded heart ornament and is to be no larger than 6x6. I used the toy of choice and went to town with fabric collage. It took me about 30 minutes to do all of the embellishing work with the machine and then I spent about 2 hours adding beaded embellishments, backing the piece with velvet and stuffing it.

I hung a vintage chandelier crystal from the bottom- which you only see a part of here.

And a lovely blurry photo of the purple velvet back!

Some close ups of the beaded embellishments that I added by hand.

I plan on making 3 or 4 more of these , a bit smaller in size, to sell at Liberty Town and possibly in my Etsy shop If I can find the time!! Theya re alot of fun to make and I am sooo very pleased that I was able to purchase the Embellishing machine- no buyers remorse here!!!!