Finished Pieces

I'm still going through some unfinished projects at the moment, mostly blanket stitching, hand-sewing buttonholes and fighting with my machine :) I used one of the pieces of felt I'd made for the Australia Challenge on The Felting and Fiber Studio site to make a glasses case. I lined it with some orange cotton fabric and stitched around the edge with the machine before blanket stitching. Side one:

Side Two:

Earlier this year, when I made my coppery bronze felt, I had some pieces of commercial art yarn left over. I made a couple of small pieces of felt to use the pieces up. One of them just had pieces as embellishment just below the top layer of merino  and they extended out of the sides. For texture on the top of other piece, I made twists of merino and yarn. The felt pieces didn't look big enough or thick enough to make anything practical out of them, they weren't even the same size, so I thought it wouldn't be a waste to sew them together to make a funky camera case. It turned out better than I expected really :)

I used the piece made with twists as the back as it was smaller.

I did manage to finish off another purse that I started a while ago, another one made from felt and silk paper. I kept the natural edges for the front flap:

I was glad the felt piece was big enough to use the same felt for the inside pockets, I know only a little part of the back one is seen, but I think it'd look wrong with a plain piece.

If you go over to the Felting and Fiber Studio, we now have a 'Community' section to the website. If you hover over the tab, you can see from the drop down menu that we have pages for the Studio Challenges where you can find links to the original challenges, and also gallery sub pages to see all the art work created for the challenges from everyone who took part. If we've missed you off, we do apologise, there were quite a lot of posts here and on the forum to go through to find them. Send us a message via the Contact Us page if you want us to add your entry. Feel free to use the challenges at any time, they're great for for inspiration. There are also pages for finding links to interviews with guest artists and suppliers and also articles by guest writers. We have a really great article coming up this week from Terrie Kwong showing us how she gets her excellent results using plants for eco printing.

Purses

I've done a little bit more work on a couple of the purses I started. I'd already sewn up one of the slubbed white ones, and now I've added the button and button-hole. I thought doing large-ish blanket stitch around the button hole would suit the colours and style of this purse.

I used some slubbed wool I bought quite a few years ago to make the felt for this. I added some extra threads and bits of silk to the felt. I can't find a photo of it, but this piece is very similar, and this is a close up of the texture.

I used a cream vintage button, and kept the natural uneven edges again for the back pocket.

The other purse I worked on was one made from a piece of felt and squares of silk paper. It was one of my favourite pieces, the silk squares are so shiny. I'm still undecided about the button, I'm thinking of using this vintage one:

This is the back:

And the inside, I like these purses with two pockets because you get to see more felt than on the zipper ones:

Free Tutorials and Silk Paper Update

I've added a new page to the blog so it's easier to find the links to my free tutorials. The new page is just under the blog banner. The tutorials are mostly photosets on flickr, but there are also some PDFs. All the tutorials were written by me and photographed by me and took a long time to do, please respect all the effort that went into them, they are for personal use only and not for reproducing or selling, thanks :)

I did get around to trying out the silk paper sheets that I made not so long ago. I first tried using the tufty bits from around the edges of the sheets to see how the paper felted. The piece I made looked a bit pale, so when I layed the wool out for the new piece, I used darker blues and purples for the background.

I was really pleased with the way it felted, though for some reason it shrank unevenly. The first piece I'd made had also shrunk unevenly, but I just assumed it was the way I lay the paper, so there were more fibres running in one direction. But both pieces had two equal layers of merino and I didn't pay particular attention to the silk paper fibres and which way they ran, and since most were two layers it shouldn't have mattered.

You can see from this angle that the silk paper felted in really nicely