Yarny Vessel

A few years ago, I wanted to make a felted vessel for my girlfriend, I had an image in my mind of how I wanted it to be, and I wanted it to be 'perfect', so it took a few attempts, but I was finally happy.

I used two of the practice vessels to make some 'woolly vessels' by needle felting locks onto them. One of them was this white vessel. I needlefelted locks of Angora, Alpaca, Wensleydale, Bluefaced Leicester and Kid Mohair onto it, then put it through the washer to make sure the locks were secure, and because a lot of them were unwashed locks.

Another one I made was this bluey green one, it reminds me of something from under the sea or around the coast. This has dyed locks of Angora, Alpaca, Wensleydale, Devon, Bluefaced Leicester and Kid Mohair. And I used texturey wools like dyed Icelandic and scoured lambswool to secure the locks.

Around the same time, I had the idea for making a really colourful texturey vessel, by needlefelting pieces of handmade yarn and wool twists onto one of my spare practice vessels. I had quite a large stash of handmade yarn and often made wool twists for projects so thought it probably wouldn't take much longer than the other two had. I was wrong! :) It took a lot longer... about 3 years off and on. I probably could have finished it sooner, and I did have phases where I would make up twists and add them, or sit spinning yarn for a few hours then cut it into pieces when it was dry and spend a few hours needling pieces onto the vessel but it never seemed to get any closer to being done! This last weekend, not feeling well enought to tackle my half finished business plan, I decided to try my hardest to finish it. I got out all my left over yarn, stashes of wool blends and a drop spindle and set to work making a big pile of wool twists and a long length of plied yarn to cut up. I also got out my box of very thin felt offcuts and wetted and rubbed some of those to add too. I didn't want to wet the yarn and wait while it hung and dried, so after snipping it into lengths I wet and rubbed one end to 'seal' it and stop it unravelling. After needling all the pieces into the bare parts of the vessel, I finished off around the top, tidying it up and securing the loose fibres. And this is the result:

And then I put it into an old pillow case and put it in the washing machine with a normal load :)  It looked like this:

I unsquashed it and gave it a few shakes and spins, ran my fingers loosely through the twists and yarns (there's a few strips of silk and organza n there too) then sat it on a tub to dry overnight. And this is what it looks like this morning:

I know it's taken me a few years to finish it, but I kind of feel like making another one now! :)

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: