Everybody's doing it!

I think I can safely say that the Textured Felt technique is a big hit! I really liked how my second piece turned out, using mainly blue and green fibres:

This is a close up of the texture:

Unfortunately, the link I posted to fibrefrolic's blog which details the technique isn't working, but I made a photo set on flickr describing how I made the blue piece.

Lots of people have given it a go with loads of great results, Judelicious created a nice bright piece with merino and silk, and this piece made by feltfinland has great colours and textures.

To see more fantastic textured felt pieces, have a look at the post about it on the felting forum, my favourite so far is the turquoise piece that Tess made.

If anyone else has tried it, it'd be great to see your results :)

Textured Felt

I stumbled across an entry recently on fibrefrolics' blog, about a really easy technique for making textured felt, using only sewing and the washing machine. I love textured felt and experimenting, and any technique that eliminates rubbing and rolling sounds good to me, so I had to give it a go :)

I only had a white wash planned, so I layed out a piece with all white fibres. I used layers of natural merino tops, English 56's and combed lambswool. Extra fibres on the top were Bamboo top and washed Bluefaced Leicester, all from World of Wool. The top layer was Polwarth and there was also some Angora locks added to the top, both from Karen's Felt Works. I also added some Alpaca and Kid Mohair.

This is what it looked like after sewing, before I put it in the washing machine:

And, this is what it looked like when it was almost dry:

There are a few more photos on my flickr photostream including photos of it just after washing and a close up.

If anyone's ever wondered whether commercial pre-felt is worth buying, I also have some photos on flickr of a few practice samples of that-a couple of different thicknesses and how it works for nuno felting.

Greek Wildfire Fundraiser

Most of us have seen reports on the news in the past few weeks about the terrible Greek wildfires. A website has been set up recently to help raise money for the reforestation of areas devastated by the fires. The project is called ART FOR TREES and the organisers are asking for donations of artwork to be exhibited and sold to help raise funds for the project. If you can help in any way, no matter how small, have a look at the website http://attikasos.blogspot.com/ for updates.
The address for sending donations is:
ART FOR TREES, c/o Manya Maratou, box 66, Marathon, 19007, Attiki, Greece
They ask that donations are sent by November.

Anyone who took part in or heard about the Australian Bushfire fundraiser will remember how succesful that was with all the great donations, and the hard work of Karen who organised the sale. For anyone who missed it, there are photos of the donations on felting forum's blog which raised AU$1558.50

New flickr Group

I started a new group on flickr recently for Handmade Book Covers. We've already got 8 members and lots of great photos of a variety of book covers. If you're on flickr and have made your own cover for any type of book, come and join us and share the photos of your creations, or just drop by to have a look.
And feel free to recommend the group to any of your friends or contacts :)
http://www.flickr.com/groups/handmadebookcovers/

Recycling felt pieces

I like to try lots of different fibres and experiment a bit, so I often end up with quite a few sample pieces or pieces of felt where I like the technique, but don't think the colours worked.
A while ago I made a collage from some of the sample pieces and I really liked it. So when I realised I had quite a lot of sample pieces again, I thought I'd make another collage and this time combine it with my latest obsession-notebook covers.

This is the finished collage piece:

And this is the Notebook cover I made from it:

I measured, and cut out a piece of craft felt to the size I needed before sewing on the felt pieces with 'invisible' thread (like thin nylon beading thread). I also added some handmade yarn scraps. I had intended finishing it off with blanket stitch around the edges, but all the sewing shrank it a little.

Notebooks and 'Fancy' knitting yarns.

My old computer died a few weeks ago, and we had a heatwave which made it far too hot to felt much, so I spent some time making some small notebook covers.

I wanted to try something a little different for a large notebook cover, so I had a look through my felting samples and found a piece of felt I tried not so long ago using fancy knitting yarns, like the fancy/funky fibres used for embellishing. I measured my notebook, added on some width for flaps, then extra for shrinkage then layed out my piece. It looked great when It was finished:

But for some reason, it had shrunk quite a lot widthways. So, I added a couple of inches to each side of the template and tried again:

It still wasn't big enough. I don't know if it's something to do with the yarns, or maybe the two thin top layers that the fibres are trapped between, are thicker than one usual one, but for some reason, these were shrinking completely differently to all the others I made recently. So, I taped some extra paper to my already huge piece I use for templates, and added even more to the width. This time it worked!

Now I can get on with sewing it into a book cover, and I've finally found a use for the 50 or so balls of yarn and all the packs of funky fibres I bought a couple of years ago!!

There are photos of some of the yarns I used, and the pieces before felting on flickr

** This is the notebook I made from the blue piece:

Where do your ideas come from?

Do you always know where your ideas came from? Or sometimes do you look at your work and wonder what gave you the idea?
I've just finished a flat needle felted piece I made for the Felting Forum's Monthly Challenge, using only natural fibres. I followed the first design I thought of, I just wanted something that was simple, but would look great with all the tones and textures of different animal fibres, so I just drew a few circles and wavy lines:

I actually stuck to my idea for once too:

But when the pattern started to build up and fill in, it started to remind me of paintings I'd seen by Pintupi artists from Australia. So, I called the piece 'Pintupi' to acknowledge the influence and lasting impression those paintings must have made on me.

That's what got me thinking about where ideas come from, and I remembered a short clip from a Derren Brown TV programme where he turned the tables on advertisers to influence their ideas.

'Pintupi' was made using 37 different animal fibres (for a full list see the photo on flickr), some I'd bought myself, some were from fibre swaps, and some lovely handwashed and handcarded batts in gorgeous shades and tones from my friend Karen.