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.

Giveaway

We're having a Giveaway over on the Felting and Fiber Studio site. I have raided my fabric and fibre stash and put together lots of goodies perfect for embellishing felt. There is lots of shiny things, including some crinkly synthetic fibres.

There is also some novelty yarns/fancy fibres: some long pieces and some shorter lengths

There are lots of different types of fabric pieces and 'scraps', silk, synthetic fabrics and organza

Some natural fibres and top, Top L-R Egyptian Cotton fibre, Crimped Viscose fibre, Bamboo Fibre. Bottom L-R: Flax, Ramie, Banana top.

Plus lots of other little things I keep adding as I think of them :)
For all the details head over to the Studio site, all you have to do to win is leave a comment on the post
Good Luck! :)

Gorgeous Fibres

I had a surprise package from Karen yesterday. She had sent me the latest Felt magazine and some gorgeous fibres. There was some lovely Tissue Silk; which has an unusual texture similar to silk chiffon, some very shiny Mulberry Silk in gorgeous colours; some purple and red organza yarn, which I'd never heard of; some beautiful sari silk ribbon; hemp; and the softest Merino ever, Optim Merino, which is 18.5 micron merino stretched to make it 15 micron. Thanks, Kaz!

I'm really looking forward to trying it all, especially the hemp and merino. I recently made a scarf from 18.5 micron merino and that was unbelievably soft, and I'm really curious about whether the hemp is similar to flax, that looks a lot like dried grass, but is soft, shiny and a kind of platignum colour after felting.

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: