Nylon

Nylon is a great versatile fibre for using with felt. It is soft, shiny and can be dyed with acid dyes just like wool or silk. It is also really inexpensive and a small amount goes a long way. I made this first piece using just 3 colours of merino and 3 shades of dyed crimped nylon fibre: red, yellow and blue. I blended them togther to make more shades. It was really fluffy when I layed it out, but felted really nicely and flat, and had a soft, warm feel.

After Felting:

For this second piece I used trilobal nylon. This is sometimes given fancy names like 'Firestar' and a price tag to match, but it's just super-bright, shiny, inexpensive nylon. I used a rainbow blend from World of Wool, but separated the colours and blended them with similar shades of merino. The nylon created a really interesting texture, it gave the felt a kind of open look, even though it was well felted.

Close up of a corner:

I'd love to see what you make with nylon, whether it's felting, spinning, weaving or anything else :)

If you're interested in trying out different fibres, have a look at the Felting and Fiber Studio site, we have a section for other fibres, and have photos of man made and plant based fibres and photos of them used in felting. We also have an 'other fibres' category for all posts related to that.

Gorgeous fibre samples

A few weeks ago, Karen sent me some gorgeous fibres. A few days ago I found time to make a few samples trying some of them out.

This is a sample using the sari silk ribbon, I untied a couple of pieces from the ends to test how it felted.

When I was looking at the sari silk ribbon, I noticed there were lots of stray threads tangled round the ribbons, so I pulled them off. I never throw any fibres away, even threads from the edges of frayed silk, because you can use them to make something like this:

The photos don't do it justice, the threads are shiny like tiny strips of coloured foil

Another gorgeous fibre that Karen sent me was dyed mulberry silks in really lovely colours. I made a sample of these in simple rows:

Aren't they gorgeous fibres? :)

Giveaway and New Studio Challenge

In case you haven't seen it yet, Karen is offering over 100 grams of gorgeous fibres for our first Studio site giveaway. For a chance to win, all you have to do is visit the site and comment on the post.

There are some gorgeous handmade batts, Romney, merino wool, merino and silk, silk noil and sari silk ribbon.

Studio Challenge

For this first quarter, it was Ruth's turn to come up with the theme for the Studio Challenge. If you want to join in all the details are here. The challenge runs for 3 months, it's just for fun, but if you do join in, comment and link us to photos of your work, or join our flickr group and add your photos there.

Stitching

I don't have a fancy sewing machine (mine's an old electric Singer without the power!) or know many stitches, but I do like it and would like to learn more. A few days ago I got my machine out and did some sewing onto a merino and milk protein fibre sample that I'd dyed. The sewing isn't very obvious but it adds something to it and makes the felt a bit firmer.

Close up:

I also learned a new stitch this week to add to my back stitch and blanket stitch :) 

I learned Fly Stitch through Sharon B's Pin Tangle blog. Every week she is showing us how to do a new stitch. It's called Take a Stitch Tuesday and you can also get inspiration from clicking the links in comments to the blogs of other people who are learning too.

                                   

I probably should have used a better fabric or maybe Binca to get the spacing and stitch length more even, but I chose this nice piece of 100% cotton fabric (IKEA tea towel!) for its size so I could maybe make it into a little drawstring bag afterwards :)