Very Pink!

My sister got me some wool tops for Christmas. Even before I'd seen the colours, I'd decided I'd make her a book cover from whatever she chose, thinking she'd probably choose her favourites. She chose a selection of pinks, not the colours I would have chosen for her, but pinks it is :)  I Picked out some shades I already had that I thought would work with them, I already had a salmon pink, some cerisey purple, reds, maroons and a nice lemon. Then I started to make some batts with my drum carder.

At first I made up some batts without any other fibres blended in, I'll use these for the bottom layer which will be inside the book cover. I split them in half lengthways after I'd made them, then rolled them up.

This is one of the lighter batts before I split it and rolled it:

I used some soy top, viscose, a small amount of banana fibre, black bamboo and dyed silk tops to blend in to make the batts for the top.

I rolled these ones a bit differently:

I picked some fabrics to embellish the surface with, some silk strips, organza, dyed cotton gauze and some synthetic lacey stuff I bought years ago which looks like it might be meant for tying back net curtains. In the 70's :)

I picked a few more embellishments too. Some silk throwster's waste, dyed bamboo fibre, commercial art yarns and fibres taken from unpicked yarns.

I'll show you more pictures when I've started to make it :)

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.

Mixed Media Piece with Felt, Fibre and Fabric

Late last year, I did a post talking about sorting out my felt scraps (actually, I think it was mostly moaning about bureaucracy) and putting them in 'categories' depending on size. I recently went through them again looking for pieces big enough to make bookmarks, and started to wonder what to do with the really small pieces. They are the piles at the bottom of this photo. Some of the pieces on the left are about 2 inches long and a quarter of an inch wide–really small. I wondered how it'd look if I just pushed them close together on top of a piece of fabric and sewed them into place. So, I tried. I kept to similar colours and added some pieces of fabric because I liked how the nuno felt pieces looked. I also added some art yarns for a bit more texture. This is it when I'd finished two thirds of it:

This is a a bit closer:

I originally planned to do the bottom part in lighter blues, but I had some gorgeous green shades, and thought this would look better.

Looking at it from a different angle:

The texture is really nice:

And of course, a Supermacro close up :)

Coppery Bronze Felt

I hadn't handmade any new felt for a few months until this week. I knew I'd have a spare couple of days for doing layouts and felting, so I went through my supplies and got a few things together. I wanted to make a texturey piece in coppers bronzes and metallic tones, so I chose some commercial art yarns, ribbon, silk tops and silk throwsters waste in those shades:

I also looked through my organza and found a few different gold shades:

I mainly used a shade of Merino from World of Wool called 'Rust', but used a few other shades and blends as well so it wasn't too 'flat'. I really like the way it turned out.

I can't resist a couple of Supermacro close ups of the texture  :)

This is one of the organza pieces.

Another piece I felted yesterday was a nuno felted piece for Ann's challenge on The Felting and Fiber Studio site. I found a quite gaudy vintage pink synthetic headscarf in my supplies and thought I'd make a piece using that. The weather was great yesterday: storm clouds, lightning, thunder, hailstone, but it kept going too dark to take good photos so here's a sneaky peek at some close ups and I'll post the whole piece soon. Ripples:

Ruffles:

If you've joined in with Ann's challenge or would like to, post a link to your work in reply to the challenge post or if you have a flickr account, tag your photo with 'felting and fiber studio challenge' and add it to the flickr group, it will show up on the Studio site's main page.