Annie
Despite good crafting intentions, I don't always get round to making things for Christmas because time flies so fast and I miss it! This year I thought I'd make more effort to get organised and the 4th quarter challenge on the felting and fibre forum, to make a Christmas decoration, gave me an extra push to do it, and I'm glad I did as I ended up having a lot of fun!
The trouble, though, is once I started thinking about it I ended up with too many ideas and I fiddled and faffed for days playing with this, that and the other. I ended up making several things, the first being this starry sky themed table runner / mat:
The table mat idea came about to protect the sideboard in my hallway from all the various keys, mugs of tea and other random things that get deposited there.
I had all sorts of colour and pattern ideas during the summer when I first thought about making one, but now it's winter I decided on an inky dark blue sky background with white stars. I had made a sample using Merino for something else ages ago in blue with white stars so I thought I'd use that idea but scale it up bigger for a seasonal mat design. I laid out 2 layers of white as a base in a traditional way, then pulled out the blue fibres in a loose puffy way to let the white under layers migrate through a little more:
I'm not sure what size the dry layout was but after wet felting it is 35cm x 65cm.
For the stars, I used a sheet of very thin white prefelt that I had made earlier in the year for some other purpose that I can't remember! I wetted down the base fibres then I cut the stars out freehand and laid them in a design on top:
Unfortunately the stars didn't felt in properly to the blue fibres. I realised I must have used the duff batch of white for that felt that has got mixed in with my stash. It has given me problems on a couple of occasions but I'm not sure which batch of fibres it is so it's a lottery!
However, I liked the mat and wanted to save it so I tried several ideas out on samples, like painting, needle felting and machine embroidery that might hold the fibres in place better. I also toyed with adding hand embroidery for extra decoration.
In the end, being impatient I ran it under the embellisher needles and it worked rather well! I might do more to it another time, and experiment with the paint etc but in the meantime I think it looks OK with just the needle felting, and it will protect the sideboard from household debris for now!
A great side effect of the white felt not felting in was that after I had used the embellishing machine to fix it, and firmly felt the fibres in, I turned the mat over and noticed that the back looked pretty good! It has made it so that it's reversible. A good result from what was a failure!
I like the effect of the of the needling showing through on the reverse, it looks almost like printmaking, so I will put that one in the ideas bank for future use :)
