Tree Inspired Art Yarns for Wet Feltmaking

Above: Art Yarn blending in with some twigs!

Annie

I’ve made some winter-into-spring, tree-inspired art yarn as my offering for the just-for-fun Q1 challenge over on the felting and fiber studio.

My yarn is purely for fun (it’s technically awful!) and for including in some wet felting at some point - it’s no good to knit with! It’s overspun and it’s messy & unbalanced (hmm, that sounds familiar!).

This quarter’s challenge is to find a tree that you like and depict it as it awakens in spring with buds/new leaves/blossom – it can be realistic or representational. It doesn't have to be a picture it can be anything textiles and fibre related e.g. weaving, felting, spinning, sewing etc.

I love love love making abstract tree pictures and will hopefully be doing many of them this year but for now I wanted to do something different so decided to spin some art yarn to represent what I saw in my garden - twiggy trees, some still very wintery, with frost, lichen & moss, some trees budding up and some really blooming like the witch hazel! I couldn’t choose a favourite so just went for "essence of tree".

There were lots of "sticky out bits" such as moss, lichen, buds, spurs etc, so I went for that as my theme. I thought that really really overspinning the fibre would make it coil and spring and stick up, and then adding chunks of cotton scrim fabrics and other bits would give extra texture & interest. These are some images I took for inspiration:

I couldn't make it quite as I'd like as I really need a wheel that can handle fat bonkers yarns but for now I have to force my little traditional wheel into submission as a new fancy one is really expensive, but firmly on my wish list!

So to start I made two batts - one twiggy coloured batt (grey, brown, blue, green - there are lots of colours in branches when you look close up) and a yellows based batt for the sticky-out bits like buds, and the sticky-on bits like lichen, with the plan to spin them, adding in bits as I go, then ply them together.  

I spun the twigs and branches first, adding a white fluffy yarn to autowrap for a short length as I thought that would represent some frost that keeps appearing still.

Then I spun the sticky-out-bits yarn - and added the yellow / green fabrics etc for lichen, moss etc.

Despite having a wheel for many years I’ve probably only spun a handful of full bobbins and plied about 2 of them! So I got in a right mess and decided to ply by hand and not on the wheel! Luckily I’m not interested in spinning technically good yarn I just want it to be fluffy and pretty!

For variation, I left a length unplied and plied the rest.