rosiepink

Sketching with fibres and fabrics

Above: Fun with making & felting carded batts

Annie

Hello.  Anyone know where the first 3 months of the year went?  I appear to have lost them somewhere!  Hope you are all having a lovely and creative year so far. 

Life has been busy, busy, busy (mostly in a good way so I'm not complaining!) so when it comes to getting big creative work done I'm not finding enough time at the moment.  Am planning to change that but in the meantime I've just been doing things in small, easy doses and simply enjoying the process of "sketching" with fibres and fabrics etc.  Not planned pieces, just whatever comes. Same as you might doodle in a sketchbook with paints or pens. No pressure. Feels nice :) Here I'm sharing some of my landscape "sketches" that I've been playing with recently, in keeping with the Forum First Quarter Challenge.

Sometimes I find it can be frustrating trying to work fast and loose with textiles because it can be hard to get immediacy and spontaneity if you have to stop to make a piece of prefelt in the right colour, spin a piece of yarn or dye a piece of fabric, so I decided to do some work using an embellisher machine because that does give some immediacy to the process. I started by taking an old piece of handmade felt and laying down some random (repurposed) fabrics. I really didn't like what I had created but using my trusty view finder I found a small section that I did like, and it seemed to work both ways up which was interesting!:

I decided to have another go and this time this piece is showing more potential, albeit an experiment. I didn't have quite the right mustard colour but used what I had (an old jumper that had seen it's way into the fabric box) and felted that in, it worked well! This is the work in progress:

I like it as it is but it's a bit plain so I think it is a candidate for some experimental painting and stitching :) I rediscovered some paint experiments I did a while back and want to have another go. It's only a small piece approx 28cm x 23cm so it might be worth making a bigger one as well to have more room to work.

I also really like the back of this one. It's got a freedom about it and I especially like the way the embellisher pushes up loops of fabric. I do quite often like the back of pieces of felt!

I also chopped up some scraps of felt and made some wet felted samples. These came out a bit 'cartoony' as I outlined in black and white thread (forgot the lines would wiggle when felted, doh!) and kept the colours flat. Except for the square of fabric in the sky which I think was the most successful part of the pictures. When I felted these 4 they were very close together and a few bits attached so they were partially joined together. I snipped them apart but that's another discovery that could be quite interesting to attempt intentionally. It's all learning time :)

Another thing I've been playing with is my drum carder to mix up colours to make some interesting, very thin, prefelts to cut up and use in further works. So far I've felted two batts and I really like the results. It's very fragile felt because the fibres are running the same way in many places where I just sort of pushed and pulled it about to lay it out, and I have only lightly fulled it. It's very thin and has holes in places and is thicker in other places. It will either make interesting prefelt for inlays or will fall apart when I use it :)

I've carded two more, 1 using pinks and 1 using some more blues:

It got me thinking that I'd like to make a really big piece with this method and keep it as a big finished piece - maybe a landscape, but maybe just an abstract colourful thing depending on how it goes. It would also need some way of mounting as it's quite fragile. I'll do another post about that at some point as things progress. I have reconfigured my work space so I can make a 1 metre square piece. Wish me luck, it's got disaster written all over it! :)

Happy New Year! Getting Organised.

Some of my new pinboards with various samples pinned on

By Annie

Happy New Year!  Hope everyone had a lovely Christmas.

I don't really make New Year resolutions but this year I am definitely going to attempt to get more done creatively and make it a priority. Part of that is making sure my environment is more conducive to creativity. For me that involves being able to see everything but also having everything tidy enough to have mental breathing space and also space to work! I'm practising tidying up after myself and not letting the end of each task remain on the desk but back where it belongs.

I'm midway through a partial reorganisation of my creative space and it feels pretty good. I can see my entire sewing desk now, but it still feels like an inspiring place. I've chucked out some things that I decided were not "sparking joy" anymore (channeling my inner Marie Kondo!) and my favourite thing is that I've finally resolved my handmade felt "sketchbook" issue.

For ages I've been trying to figure out how best to organise my samples & experiments so they are useful and not just left in random boxes piled up. I've considered various things like making a giant fabric sketchbook or just pinning them in regular scrapbooks but that felt too inaccessible for how I want to work. I used to have things pinned on a few pinboards on the wall but they were not easily accessible as they hung above a desk and were also all wobbly as they were hanging on the picture rail, so I took them down and packed everything away again. However, I had a lightbulb moment recently and I bought some more pinboards, this time to use as sketchbook "pages", not up on the wall but free to sit on the floor, against the wall, or on the desk.

I unpacked all of my boxes of samples and experiments and a few random small pics and pinned them to the boards.

Now I can pin, unpin, rearrange and move the samples about and also I have a blank board where I can pick a few relevant bits and pin them like a working mood board.

The boards can travel round the room with me or stack up neatly like a giant book :)

This solution is relatively compact (compared to the plastic boxes) and is accessible and easy to use.

This is not completely everything - I still have some of the bigger pieces in a pile but it is a small manageable pile not a mountain of random disorganised odds n ends. It suits me because it is both messy (lots going on) and neat (easy to stack away).

Two of the boards that I have used mainly for free motion samples are sat on my newly tidied sewing desk. Feeling pretty smug about the tidy!

Now I've got space I might even finish the llama print pyjama trousers that I started making about 6 months ago!  Also, while sorting through my fibres and fabrics I've rediscovered quite a lot of nice fabrics that I had forgotten about.  Feeling newly inspired, I'm aiming to make a few small landscapes with some of them.

Btw, in case you were wondering, the cork in the background of some of the photos is my wonderful cork wall that I use to organise all of the house stuff and any bigger projects that I have on the go but it wasn't suitable to house my samples as they would just take over! :) 

Season's Greetings!

Thank you to everyone who has read our blog this year - we really appreciate all the lovely feedback we've had.  Let's hope that 2019 is a creatively fulfilling year for all!

Note to all fibre enthusiasts - have a look at this festive giveaway from ZED: The Right Fibre

Christmas Felt Tea Cosy

There are lots of pretty things you can buy for the kitchen to use at Christmas, but where do you store them for the rest of the year?

So I decided to decorate my felted tea cosy for Christmas in a way that would be temporary, so that as soon as Christmas is over I can remove the embellishments.

I made my felted tea-cosy in 2008 and it's still in daily use but only one side ever gets seen whether it's on the tea-pot or hanging on the kitchen wall...

...so I decorated the reverse side and that's the side that will show during the festive season.

After much pencil-end chewing I drew a rough design then, because I find proper drawing difficult, I searched the internet for a free-to-use outline of a deer. 

It's extremely difficult to draw a complicated shape directly onto felt and freehand cutting a deer out is beyond me.  Luckily there is an easy way using freezer paper.

I reversed the outline then traced it onto the paper side of a piece of freezer paper, then placed it, waxy side down onto a small, thin piece of white fulled felt.  I ironed the freezer paper onto the felt (1-2 minutes with a medium dry iron) then let it cool for half an hour.

I won't lie to you - cutting the white felt to the outline of the deer was very fiddly and I nearly lost some of the antler.  Next time I'll choose something simpler!  Holding my breath, I carefully removed the freezer paper.

I put a felting mat inside the tea cosy then I used a felting needle to 'tack' the white deer in place.  I should mention that my tea cosy is a chunky thing - it's thick and therefore easy to work on. I didn't go too near the edges of the silhouette for fear of splitting the white felt - even so the antler still went a bit wonky - so although tacking the deer shape in place would be ok for art work it wouldn't survive long on a working tea cosy!

The snowflakes are just wisps of white merino wool fibres loosely needle felted in.

The snowy 'ground' is fancy yarn. I used white thread to hold it in place - a small stitch every inch.

I liked all the blue and white but a small colour accent was needed so I cut a piece of Christmas ribbon to make a collar and attached it to the white felt with fabric glue.

When I'd finished I could see that I just had to make a new hanging hook the same colour as the tea cosy, so I knitted an i-cord from some sparkly crochet cotton.

All the embellishments are easily removable after Christmas.  The deer can be peeled off, the snowflakes popped out, the yarn unstitched and the forgiving felt will smooth itself out with a bit of gentle rubbing.  

But I'll keep the sparkly hanging hook - it looks good with the other side of the tea cosy!

Mr Snowman, Mrs Snowman and Rosie

I couldn't resist - I wanted to make another snowmen diorama to photograph for my Christmas cards.  

I made the snowmen and snow in the same way as before - details in these two previous blog posts:

snowmen 2015

snowmen 2017

The tree (aka a twig from the garden) is held upright with a lump of white-tack around its base and it's decorated with tiny merino wool balls and crystal beads threaded onto white sewing cotton.

I knitted the pink hat and scarf from crochet cotton on the smallest needles I had, then I made miniature knitting needles from cocktail sticks, stained with a grey marker and finished with sparkly beads, so that Mrs Snowman could carry on and finish knitting the scarf. 

The blue gift is simply a wrapped and beribboned cardboard cube but Rosie looks excited by it.

I hope the picture gives you a smile because I had great fun making it!

Experimenting With Layering and Editing in Feltmaking

Annie

Since my wonderful class at West Dean I've been having a play and have made various samples to test out ideas.   The most relevant to this project was this one:

I like the way the colours peeped through the open weave.  Still vibrant but layered and more interesting.

For this picture I started by having a go at randomly "making marks", with the intention of turning it into a picture of something later in the process (most likely flowers I thought at the time, as that's what I like doing!).

I used fibres, prefelts, fabrics, yarns and also some of my handspun yarn:

Some of the colours in my materials were my usual colours but others were a bit more experimental for me such as the purple.  I really like the dark blue spotty fabric which I think is from an old scarf.

Once I'd done a bit of mark making I started to form a flowers composition. After a while I thought it was too much so I employed the editing / whiting out idea. For this I used some white open weave cotton fabric which I pulled several strands from to make it a little more see-through and laid it over the areas I wanted to "knock back".  The photos below are after felting but it shows the idea.  After felting it was a lot more see-through than when it was laid out.

I thought I'd finished laying out by picture 4 in the images below but then I thought I'd push it and added some pink merino flowers over the top then outlined them with white yarn.

Here is an example of some of the layering in the picture, before and after felting.  Obviously I'd laid some other bits on top before felting but it shows the idea.  I like looking at small areas of a bigger picture to think how little passages could be used in later work.  I think this open weave blue over white could represent windows in a skyscraper maybe.

Here are some other details photos:

During the process I covered up some lovely pieces of handspun yarn and some nice shapes but overall I think the sacrifices were worth it to get more depth and layering into the picture.  Overall I'm not sure it's my ideal colour palette or composition or quirky enough design but that doesn't matter.  With every experiment I find more things to try out and get more ideas for future works.  But most important it's great fun to do.

Here is a final photo of the whole thing.  The ratio of height to width is not ideal but I do like the way the blue vase hangs off the bottom:

 

Fabulous Flowers at West Dean College!

Detail from one of my experimental paintings.
So many ideas to bring into feltmaking from this process.

Annie

A couple of weeks ago I attended another fabulous course at West Dean College, called Floribunda. The abbreviated description was "...be more expressive and...indulge your enjoyment of colour, texture, form and paint...make paintings that go beyond traditional flower painting, to encourage you to be bold, experimental and courageous" Sounded just perfect, I love creating pictures of flowers and experimenting. It was with a lovely tutor, Emily Ball, and I had a wonderful time. I learnt an awful lot about painting, and the process of painting, but I also learnt loads that I can bring into my feltmaking too. Double win!   I do like to experience the creative process of other people using different media such as paint.  The medium may be different but a lot of the lessons you can learn apply whatever you do in your creative time.

At the college there is inspiration everywhere, whatever the time of the year. The gardens are tended with lots of love and it shows:

 

Here is a selection of some of the flowers that were gathered from the grounds, by the gardeners, for the centre of the classroom:

To start with we did lots of exercises that were really helpful in getting us to loosen up, such as random mark making, just experimenting with our materials to see what different effects we could achieve, without a finished picture in mind:

We also did an exercise where we painted purely from touch - we each had a flower/plant behind our back that we had not seen given to us and we painted everything that we felt with our fingers e.g. velvety, spiky, smooth etc. This was one of my favourite exercises and it felt really free.  Mine was an achillea:

We then turned one or two of our mark making / scribbling exercises into pictures of flowers. This gave us a great background to start on rather than a white blank page and, through the editing, removing and adding to the marks some great things happened!  I really enjoyed doing these:

We all worked at our own pace when not doing group tutorials and I painted several pieces, none of them masterpieces but I loved the outcomes, the process and what I learnt from them.

Here is one of the pieces I did (A1 size / 33in x 23in), I had loads of fun doing it but fought with it on and off for hours, changing it and turning it and editing bits in and out:

And some details of that painting and another one that I did:

One of the main things I learnt that was most useful for me was don't be too precious too early about any one piece of the work - if you let go and allow yourself to edit then great things can happen. Both of the following photos are pieces of painting that I edited with white paint, and coloured paint, turned round and edited again. I love the scarring that shows through from the layers below, and the fact that the sections turned out much better for it. You can discover a lot from editing and being brave and pushing yourself:

I really got stuck in and was exhausted by the end, in a good way, and covered in paint!

Having worked through these exercises and paintings I decided that it would be a lot of fun to push myself more in some future projects to be even more experimental with compositions and layouts in my feltmaking and other textiles work.  The rapid work of sketching and mark making is very freeing and I will endeavour to do more of this, both in my sketchbook and also with fibres.  I learnt that it is important to observe and to think, but not to overthink and not to allow my logical and sometimes fearful brain to rule!  Now overflowing with inspiration I've begun making a fresh new pile of prefelts to use to layer up and cut up to use in some new pieces:

'The Windfarm' - a simple seascape

Small abstract seascapes are quick and easy to make.  Just lay down some coloured horizontal lines and 'hey presto' the eye is tricked!

Make 3 base layers of wool fibres - start with a vertical layer so that the 3rd layer is vertical.  Wet down the wool fibres then mark a horizon with a piece of thread. 

The layout shown below was approximately 30 x 20cm (12"x 8") and only Merino wool fibres were used.

You can just lay down horizontal, dry, coloured strips of wool fibres, but I prefer to wet the strips as I think the results are better. 

The sample below shows 10 strips of merino wool fibres on a base layer of white (each colour was the same amount of fibres).  The top 5 strips were pre-wetted and the bottom 5 strips were dry, and when placed on the base layer they looked identical.  However, during felting the dry fibres have spread and the colour is not so intense.  The pre-wetted fibres don't spread so much and the colours stay vibrant.

To wet a strip of fibres, simply hold each end and saturate it in a bowl of soapy water.  Then lift it out and run finger and thumb gently down the length.

To make the sky, start at the top with the darker colours then work downwards to the lighter ones.  Go back over it putting in colours wherever you think they need to be! 

To make the sea, start with the darker colours on the horizon (remember to remove the guide thread) and mirror some of the sky colours in the water then add a bit of headland. 

Add a focal point.  Perhaps a lighthouse or buildings or boats.

The focus for this seascape is a windfarm and the windmills were formed from very thin wisps of white merino wool fibres.

During the early felting the straggly bits on both sides of the piece of felt were trimmed and it became painfully obvious that the windmills looked more like drunken dancers, so they were removed!

When the felt was dry the windmills were added using white cotton perle embroidery thread - each windmill comprised a french knot and 4 long stitches.

I have a stash of frames bought from charity (thrift) shops and I had just the right one for 'The Windfarm'.

This is a very quick and easy way to make a seascape and it will never be the same twice! 

 

Free-Standing Wet-Felted Art Experiment

 

We often enjoy the challenge of translating a picture we've made in another medium, into a felted piece. We do love to experiment! This time we're using a mixed media (paint, crayon, pastel, watercolours) "Artist Book" from a lovely workshop we recently attended, details below. Shown above is our first attempt - it measures 72 x 15 cm (28"x 6").  It's based on a concertina book / free standing picture as shown in the photos down the page.

We cut some 160gsm cartridge paper, roughly the same size as the finished felt, then scored the paper where it needed to form the folds.  We flattened the paper then applied a generous amount of pva to it then smoothed the felt onto it.  Both the paper and the felt were larger than needed to allow for trimming into shape with a craft knife when the glue was dry.

Overall the result of the experiment was pretty good but the paper needs to be thicker to support the edges better (as can be seen above) and whether the felt, pva and paper would stand the test of time still needs to be established.

This could open up lots of possibilities for creating seasonal decorations or fancy greeting cards. A bit of stitching might look good, or experimenting with fine felt could add a new element.  Maybe even shaping it a bit, it doesn't have to have straight sides.  Row of Christmas trees anyone?  It might even work on pelmet vilene but we'd have to try that out. 

The one-day Artists Books workshop that inspired the experiment was tutored by Sarah Humby in Stanpit Village Hall, Christchurch.  It was a great day, the cake was delicious, and the view from the workroom was lovely:

We made several free-standing paintings - here are two...

...and we made painted boxes in which to keep them.

 

Previously I blogged about my attempt at recreating a painted picture of Mackerel which was great fun to do.

Annie says she has a hankering to attempt to recreate her Pomegranate painting into handmade felt. It's working it's way up the list of things to do!

How to make silk paper and use it in wet felting

Silk paper is very easy to make and cuts into any shape you want so it makes a good embellishment in wet felting.  The sample above shows just silk paper shapes on merino wool, but of course you can mix silk paper shapes with other embellishments.

There are a few different ways to make silk paper but here's a simple one.

You will need:

• newspaper (or whatever absorbent paper you have to hand)
• 2 pieces of net (such as tutu net) - in this tutorial the pieces of net are 50 x 40cm (20" x 15")
• a piece of heavyweight plastic larger than the net (perhaps cut from an old parcel bag)
• wallpaper paste (or carboxymethyl cellulose granules, aka CMC, for archival quality textile work)
• container to mix the paste in
• a mister spray bottle containing warm water and half a teaspoon of dish-washing liquid
• a small sponge
• silk fibres such as: tops, noil, mawata hankies, throwsters waste

Make up 500ml (just under a pint) of wallpaper paste following the instructions on the packet - this will be more than you need to make a small sample, but it will keep for another day if you cover it tightly.

Cover a work surface with several layers of newspaper then place the piece of plastic on top.  Lay the piece of net on top of the plastic.

Make a layer of silk fibres, in the colour of your choice, on top of the net - don't go right to the edge of the net but leave 5-10 cms (2-4") of net showing all around. 

Make a second layer of silk fibres on top of the first layer ensuring that the fibres run in a different direction to those on the first layer.

You don't have to lay the fibres neatly - you can put them exactly as you wish.

Here's a close-up view of the fibres on the second layer.

Carefully place the second piece of net over the fibres and in line with the piece of net underneath the fibres.  Then spray the silk, through the net, with the water containing a little dish-washing soap.  When the silk fibres are saturated, use a small sponge to remove as much water as possible.  Check the reverse side for dry-spots.

Apply wallpaper paste liberally to the silk fibres, through the net, to both sides - either use a small sponge or a large soft paintbrush.

Use your fingers to really work the paste into the silk fibres on both sides for a couple of minutes then, starting in the centre, push any excess paste away until it's on the plastic and not on the net .

Leave the silk paper between the pieces of net to peg it up to dry.  Protect the area beneath the silk paper with a drip tray or newspaper because it's very hard to clean up!

 

When the silk paper is dry, carefully peel the netting away.  Don't worry if you can see the pattern of the netting on the paper as it will disappear during felting. 

You can cut shapes out of the silk paper freehand or you can trace shapes onto the paper side of freezer paper then iron the silk paper to the waxy side of the freezer paper using a dry iron on medium heat for 2-3 seconds.  Use baking paper underneath and on top to protect the iron and ironing board. Gently press - don't move the iron back and forth.  Let it cool.  When you've cut out your shapes, gently peel the silk away from the freezer paper.

When you're trying out a new technique it's a good idea to make a small sample so that any problems can be easily corrected.

The following instructions presume basic felt making knowledge, so if you've never made felt before, please see our free tutorial 'how to make flat felt'

Four layers of blue merino wool and a partial layer of white merino wool were used to make this small sample - we didn't worry about neat edges as the sole purpose of making the sample was to try out the application of silk paper shapes.

After the merino wool was wetted and flattened, the silk paper shapes were placed on top then wetted through a piece of net. The felt was made with gentle agitation on both sides until the silk had been trapped by the wool fibres,  then worked until it was firm enough.

The merino wool fibres will migrate right through the silk paper and if you think the result looks dull, you can shave the surplus fluff away from the silk using a one-blade razor.  Be careful to not abrade the silk - use a very light touch.

It was useful making this sample because we found that the dark red silk 'bled' a little and that will be worth remembering for future use!