Rachelle Gardner

Rachelle Gardner is a mixed media artist from the US. At the moment she is focusing on fibers and textiles. Some of her recent work is lace felt which she creates by free motion embroidery on water soluble stabiliser and hand dyed wool which is then lightly felted to produce beautiful pieces in rich colours with intricate designs. On her blog she has examples of some of her recent work and also a post showing the process.

Rachelle is also about to embark on an adventurous project transforming her 2-D lace work into large scale 3-D sculpture.

If you'd like to know more about that, visit her Aspen Project website, there's even the opportunity for you to be involved and help with the costs of the project. Everyone who helps out receives a credit and also a reward of beautiful unique artwork, made individually for each person.

Book Review: Creating Felt Artwork

Creating Felt Artwork: a step by step guide

This is an excellent, information packed, 60 page, full colour e-book by Rosiepink fibre artists Annie and Lyn. Using one of their own pieces, 'The Meadow' as a guide, they show you a step by step process and give you all the information you need to make your own beautiful, unique felt artwork. There are lots of nice, clear photos throughout, and simple but detailed instructions with lots of excellent tips and advice. Before the main part on how to create your felt wall hanging, there is a great section about finding inspiration, how to interpret your ideas into a design and planning your artwork.

The information in the main step by step guide, is excellent. It starts with a detailed equipment list with lots of hints for using inexpensive items you'd find around the house, and advice about preparing your work area. The instructions for how to lay out the wool for your design are very clear and detailed, and there are lots of photographs to illustrate each stage. There's a very detailed explanation of the whole felting process and valuable information about choosing other fabrics and fibres to add to your design.

The next section teaches you how to enhance and embellish your artwork with simple machine embroidery. This part is packed with information and advice too. There's everything you need to know about stabilising your felt artwork and choosing the right colours and types of thread to work best with your design. There's information about techniques to create the effect you want and how to add detail. This section also has advice about adding hand stitching and how to use machine and hand stitching create effects and texture and also about using other fibres for adding extra texture and detail.

Once you've finished your felt art wall hanging, you'll want to display it. There is a great section on how to back and hang your artwork simply and effectively, with clear instructions and photos. But if you'd like to display your artwork a different way, there is also a separate section on alternate ways to display your artwork and how to care for it.

There's information and tips throughout the book for techniques to help you realise your own design and create your own unique artwork. This includes how to make and use prefelt for more control over your design; how to re-use spare felt in the same way; using yarn and small drafted sections of wool for design, and adding other fabrics and needlefelting to enhance your artwork.

So, what if you've followed all the instructions and you're not happy with the way it turned out, or maybe you made a few sample pieces to try out your colour choices and don't know what to do with them? There's even a section for that, with some great ideas on what to do with spare pieces of felt.

And don't worry if you're an absolute beginner and have never tried felting before, or don't really know what all the felting terms mean, there's a glossary at the end with everything you need to know and an appendix with a complete step by step guide to making felt, with lots of clear photos.

This really is excellent value for money. It's an invaluable source of information and advice about creating beautiful feltwork and enhancing it simply with easy tips and techniques. And the great advantages about being an e-book is you can have it instantly and zoom into the photos for even more detail :)


If you'd like to own a copy visit Annie and Lyn's website http://rosiepink.typepad.co.uk/rosiepink/creating-felt-artwork-ebook.html It's also available on Craftsy http://www.craftsy.com/project/view/Creating-Felt-Artwork/43696

Cotton Gauze

Do you ever use lightweight cottons in your felting work? I’ve been quite busy lately working on my project of ‘other’ fibres and fabrics used in felting. I’ve been making a lot of felt pieces using lightweight cotton fabrics like muslin and cheesecloth. Another fabric I’ve used is Cotton Gauze, this is also known as ‘Scrim’, and I’ve used a couple of different types. This is some of the dyed pieces I have.

The gauze is really good for creating texture and effects. I’ve been making some large bold pieces to use for bookcovers.

I’ve also made some smaller pieces with resists, using the gauze for texture. This piece was for making into a pouch.

and this became a textured sculptural vessel

I’m starting to have a huge pile of colourful, texturey felt pieces all waiting to be made into something once the weather gets too hot for felting. This is a close up of a large piece I made for making a purse and matching mirror case out of.

The lightweight cottons also work really well for using in scarves and wraps instead of the usual silk. Do you use scrim or cotton fabrics in felting, or fibre art? How do you find it to work with? Have you ever dyed your own? (My hands are currently a strange shade after using red, blue and brown dyes this week!) I’d love to hear about your experiences with it and see photos if you have links :)

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

Silk Paper

Over on the Felting and Fiber Forum, we've been discussing silk paper recently. It started when Pam showed us this gorgeous silk vase  and then a beautiful silk box made from delicate silk hankies, threads and angelina fibres. Then Karen was inspired to try making silk paper and after finding some silks work better with different methods made some gorgeous pieces. Once the hard work had been done ;) I thought I'd give it a go too.
I decided to just jump in and try it with spray starch. I'd read a few years ago that it was possible to make silk paper by spraying a layer of silk fibres with starch, adding another layer of silk fibres and spraying that, then covering with baking parchment and ironing until it was dried. Well, it's almost that easy. It's hard to get the spray starch onto the fibres without blowing them away, so it takes a bit of practice to get the spray to 'drizzle'. I found it helpful to spray first, so I got an old piece of cotton cloth and layed it onto brown parcel paper, sprayed the cloth with starch, added a layer of silk, drizzled then sprayed starch onto that, then added more silk, more starch, then covered with another layer of cloth, another piece of parcel paper and ironed. The results were mostly really good. A few times, the layers wanted to separate, but I then had two layers of finer silk paper.
This is 2 layers of mulberry silk:

This piece is 2 layers of mulberry silks and tussah silks. I tried to make it two sided. This is the front:

And this is the back:

This is also two layers of mulberry and tussah silks:

And this piece is made up of two layers of fluffed up mulberry and tussah silks, silk throwsters waste and silk hankies:

This is one layer:

This is from one of the first pieces I made. The layers of tussah silk and dyed mulberry silks separated, so I was left with a layer of mulberry silk (which I used on another piece) and a piece of honey coloured tussah silk paper with subtle colours from the mulberry silk dyes staining it. This is the piece before felting, with the silk paper cut into a few shapes:

And this is how it looked after felting:

It kept the shapes really well, even the wispy tufty bits from around the edges.

I'm hoping to try the wallpaper paste method soon. I recently got the book 'Handmade Silk Paper' by Kath Russon, recommended to me by Lyn from Rosiepink. All I need to do is actually start reading it instead of just drooling over the pictures :)
Have you made silk paper or paper from any other fibres? Do you use it in felting or something else? I'd loved to hear about it or see photos.

Texture

I've been working on a project about using 'other' fibres in felting and noticed that 'texture' has been a common theme lately. I thought I'd post a collection of photos showing different textures from wet felted pieces I've made.

This is a green organza used as a base:

This is the top, strips of organza over blocks of coloured Merino:

This is another organza base, a slightly stiffer gold:

This is a piece of cerise organza:

This is a close up of silk in textured nuno felting:

This is a blue-green piece of textured felt, made with lots of layers and inclusions and felted mostly in the washing machine:

And lastly, this is a piece of texture felt using reds, pinks, oranges and yellow shades:

Do you have any photos of textural felt? How do you like to create it? Do you like to add to your felt to create texture with stitch or other fabrics and fibres? I'd love to see photos of your work :)



Felting and Fiber Studio site Giveaway

We're having a giveaway on The Felting and Fiber Studio site. If you'd like to 'win' a small notebook with a hand sewn, hand felted cover, just come over to the site and leave a comment on the post.
This is the front of the book:

and this is the inside:

Please read the post and check back on Tuesday for the winner :)
http://feltingandfiberstudio.com/2012/05/02/giveaway/