rosiepink

Felt Bead Vase Hangers and a Bottle Beachscape

We love having cut flowers indoors but usually only have them on occasions of celebration or illness, so most of the time our vases just sit there looking a tad boring.

Can't have that can we? So we prettied them up a bit!  

We made 40 tiny beads using the finger and thumb method - take just a few fibres of merino wool, mess them up between your fingers, then dry-roll the fibres between thumb and fingertips until it looks like a bead.

Then dip it into some warm water, made soapy with a little dish-soap, and continue rolling it between thumb, fingertips and palm until it's firm but with a little give so that you can push a needle through easily. Leave them in a warm place to dry.

They were then strung onto 180cm (6 feet) of florist's wire, gauge 0.5mm (0.02"), using a needle with an eye large enough to take the wire.

The beads were randomly distributed along the length of the wire, then the wire was wound, alternately over three or four fingers, into a coil then the ends were twisted together and a hook was formed.

The coil slips easily on and off the neck of the vase... 

...and is kept in place with the hook.

A chunky version, with a lot less wire and bigger felt beads, looks good on a glass vase (it's actually a nice whisky bottle!). The felt beads were made as shown in our free tutorial but as we had to use a large needle for the florist's wire, pliers were needed to push and pull the needle through the felt beads.

It's not easy to stop 'playing' when the wool is out, so we made some more felt beads in seascape colours: yellows for sand; pink for seashells; greens for sea and blues for sky.  Then we stripped the glass vase of its pretty hanger and made it into a bottle beachscape.

There are so many ways to decorate with felt beads - cushions, door handles, seasonal garlands, lampshades, baskets....we're eyeing up all the things in our houses now!

 

 

Prepping Prefelts and Knitting Overspun Yarn for Felting

 

Annie

 

In the same way that art journalers make stacks of colourful painted and mixed media papers to use in collage in their journals, I like to do the same for feltmaking when i get time.  The random colours and patterns of the papers really make something special when they are torn and painted over and that works in feltmaking too when pieces are cut up, pulled apart and stitched over.  I've made quite a few felt "collage papers" this week - fairly loose prefelts so they are quite soft and fluffy and delicate but will (hopefully!) look good when felted into new works.

 

The great thing about this is unless you have a specific final piece in mind you can just pick any colours and any fabrics and make anything you fancy.  You don't have to worry about the outcome, in the same way as if you were doodling in a sketchbook, it's about the process, and making supplies and ideas to feed into more work. A couple of them do actually look quite landscapey in an abstract way just as they are (gotta love an accidental landscape!) and some are just colours for cutting up and felting in to give straight edges or layering of colours.

 

 

 

 

 

The photo above shows the laying out of the fibres in progress.  I laid some out in a more traditional horizontal / vertical layers way, and some I laid out using "clouds" of fibres to give variation in thickness and also to leave holes and really thin bits.  It still holds together OK because the fibres are all crisscrossed when pulled out into "clouds" of fibres.

 

I aim to use some of these if I ever get round to creating my interpretation of some of my coastal holiday photos.  Watch this space!  

 

I like to do anything fibre related and you might have previously seen my handspinning attempts.  Well I went for another day of spinning with the lovely ladies of Sway on Sunday and one of the ladies had been given a llama fleece - it was lovely and soft and a beautiful grey colour.  It did look like there was an actual llama sleeping in the corner until you got up close.  I had a go at spinning a few handfuls of the unwashed unprepared fleece and it comes up lovely.  I would like a scarf or jumper made from it.  Unfortunately I only made a small sample of yarn but it is something I will look out for.  I did spin some other bits n bobs including some shetland merino mix.  I also knitted up a sample (in the scruffiest worst knitting ever!) of some multicoloured yarn I spun just trying out various things - it came up sort of thick and thin and had a few odd bits of this n that in it, like silk strands and cotton and there might even be some banana fibre in there! 

 

I told my husband it was the first section of arm for a jumper I was knitting for him - he smiled politely enough but I could see he was worried!  Luckily for him it's just a test piece - I thought I'd knit it, then block it then the next thing is to wash it to see what happens.  I might then cut it up and felt it in to something else if it is not too felted in itself.

 

I tried to knit it straight from the skein but as it was too overspun for unplied yarn, it was like knitting with a long wriggly worm so I wrapped it around a piece of interfacing to stop it tangling up.  It occurred to me that it looked like a huge woolly bead and then that got me thinking about more ideas!  I should finish the little samples from my last post first though really.....