A Purl of Wisdom

I was at Knotty By Nature today to get a few supplies and I learned to cast off my knitting

and how to purl. It feels great to finally know what that is and to be able to do it!

And I'm adding layers to this, now.

Hand Crafted

This velvet devore is nuno felted using merino and silk roving. I will add more colour and texture variety later on. I am really liking manipulating the fibres directly with my hands and how I can feel them change. And I was in the studio wondering where my muse was going to take me next when I suddenly wondered if I could make a wet felted hand - and no, I didn't use my hand as a base - it would have turned into a prune, as the wool took several days to dry! I'm not sure what I will do with it, but it's bound to come in hand-y - maybe for when I could use a hand :)

This began as a dry felting experiment with yarn and fabric bits on roving and commercial felt

and turned into a wet felted one, when I added more roving on the top:

All these random experiments are continuing to teach me how the materials interact and what effects the various processes yield.

Feeling My Way

I have been exploring further with felting, which is really a whole new medium with all the trial and error learnings along the way. I am working small and just sampling, seeing what's possible for now, with an eye to creating larger and completed pieces in future. For these I carded different colours and types of wool to make some prefelts and tried a lattice. Here is a sliced ball technique I have done before - but wanted to do again. I am building a stash of felt so that at some point I will have enough to draw from to make a finished piece.

A few cord experiments - the bottom one is dry felted with an embellisher machine.

And seeing how yarn might be wet felted to add design.

Impromptu and small as these are, having tried these various techniques, I will remember them as possbilities later when I want to make something specific.

Pops of Colour

Fall is neutrals... With pops of colour.

I have a little more stitching left to do, here, but I have learned more about felting and wet felting in making this. It takes awhile to get the feel of new materials and I have plenty of ideas I want to explore.

And when I found some unidentified red leaves on the ground, I overdyed this wool with them and a few maple leaves:

Fitting It All In

I take alot of photos and choosing just a few of them to post here can be challenging. So if I collage them, I can show a few more and this also makes me think about which two go together and why - what am I trying to say? These two are similar and so different:

And it was the contrast that caught my eye here, too - arrivals from the sea with the hard, smoother, neutral coloured shell in amongst that glorious riot of seeweedy colour and texture.

I have been enjoying combining textures with felting and stitch and will post the larger photo of this in a next post. I have also sewn myself a jacket - meant to be a prototype for more interesting things to come, but I am pleased it fits and I will have something new to wear once I finish the edges.

Felt Fun

I have been having such fun putting this felted piece together today, learning as I go about combining a variety of materials with my needle felting machine. I've begun hand stitching light and shadow on the leaves, now. And I also made some silk paper which is partially transparent when held up to the light.

And here is some wet felting and natural dyeing that may end up with these beads on it - or not.

Here's the whole of it:

I also natural dyed more silk shibori and over dyed other silk with eucalyptus leaves I picked last year -which only yielded slight colour.

Hearts Multiplying

I played a bit more with this, adding ragged edges, more silk fibres and introducing it to silk gauze and velvets: But then another heart insisted on nestling here:

And was joined by one more and a bit of silk organza ruffle on the edge. The silks are dry felted in, with a machine.

And here is the back of what has become a journal cover - my shibori rabbit moon.

Today I was finishing putting Easter decorations about and I saw this table runner I made two years ago but realized I had never quilted. So I echoed the flowers with pink and purple variegated thread and I like how the back, which is made from identical fabric, ended up with what remind me of stitched shadows, intersecting the flowers.