Feb/March Review: Unusual Embellishments

I mentioned at the end of my look back at January, that February had been all about unusual embellishments. That carried on into March too, but I'll stick with the theme and show them altogether. Using unusual embellishments isn't really unusual for me, but I think I might have a bit of a surprise near the end :) It started in November when my friend had some shiny hair decorations/extensions that she was removing and throwing away, so I asked if I could 'scav' (scavenge) them out of the bin to try felting with. They originally come straight, but after being plaited/braided, end up wavy/kinked. I decided to try them with a wool blend which came in some Botany Lap Waste from World of Wool. It is really soft, greyish and has the odd bit of Angelina blended in. I couldn't see any in what I used though:

From this angle you can see better how they attached:

Thicker pieces of the fibre kept their shape and were more prominent, and where it was thinner/spread out, they blended in more:

The next time my friend used the extensions, she saved them for me when she removed them. They were really nice colours:

I blended up some Merino to match:

I used the same wool blends twice, and I started by matching the fibres to the blends:

But used different coloured fibres on top at the other end (not great photos)

As soon as I started to wet it down it felt like there were far too many fibres on top. They kind of look/feel like trilobal nylon, but not quite as fine. It took a lot to get it felted, the fibres acted like a barrier between my hands and the wool, I had to rub mostly from the back. I even resorted to rolling the felt in a bamboo mat. This is how it looked when it was dry:

You can see how much of the fibre is loose:

I tugged off lots of loose fibre and this is how it looked afterwards:

It looked like I pulled it all off, but it was more obvious looking on an angle:

And I had to get a supermacro close up!

I used the same hair extensions again. This is how the finished piece looked:

I twisted some of it around some wool twists I'd previously made, spun some with some white pencil roving, fluffed some up and made a kind of 'ball' out of it, blended some with Merino, and used a couple of pieces which were still partly plaited/braided. The two biggest patches on the bottom of this angled photo are, on the left, the loose ball, and in the centre, the blend with wool:

This is a closer angled pic:

This is one of the partly plaited pieces:

I undid the ends of this one, sorry, not the best photo:

This next pic is a small amount spun with pencil roving on a drop spindle. I just twisted it, then used it so it's loose:

I did my last experiment with unusual fibres a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately I didn't get lots of great photos, but this is what I tried out:

And this is one of the locks:

I used 23mic natural white Merino, and this is the finished sample:

This is a close up of the top left where I fluffed up the fibres:

And this is how the migration looked on the back:

 This is one of the felted locks, it is attached at the base, and springs loose:

Sorry there aren't more/better photos, but did you guess what the fibre is? It's my friend's hair who gave me the extensions! I clippered it for her a couple of weeks ago and decided to see how it felted :)
What's the most unusual fibre you've ever tried?

Natural Wools and Fibres

I've been re-organising my supplies lately, and one of the things I did was put my dyed silk products into one box, and my natural undyed silk supplies in another. While I was doing this I had an idea to make a silky cocoon type pod. I had a look on google images and liked the look of ones which were more fibrey, 'scruffy' looking. So I started by really piling the silk on to my resist. I added a couple of bunched up silk hankies, a silk hankie I'd drafted into roving, silk throwster's waste, schappe silk from wollknoll, different types of silk noil, some coccon strippings. I can't find my undyed silk carrier rods, but I did find a little bag of 'fluff' I'd carded from silk carrier rod scraps a few years ago, so I put that on too. I did a layer of 18.5 Mic  Merino on top of the silk, then on one side I lay lengths of white pencil roving. I used 23 Mic Merino for the second layer, and then 2 layers of English 56s. I do like the way it turned out, but I didn't expect it to be so 'neat'!

I thought with all the silk I'd piled on it'd be a lot more fibrey, but it does have nice texture and structure and there's a lot of different shades.

This is a closer look at some texture:

And this is some of the throwster's waste:

I wondered if some of the texture and features would show up more with a light inside, so I used a bit of sewing thread to attach it to a ceiling light to see:

You can definitely see more, and here you can see the ridges from the pencil roving better, I think it looks quite creepy with the light inside:

Another piece I've made recently is this wall hanging. I laid it out about a week or so before I got time to felt it, and I think it ended up being 'upside down'. I wrote down the wools and fibres I used as I laid it out, but think I forgot a few as I kept adding locks here and there! Also, I added a few locks to the bottom just before I felted it, but I'm certain that was originally the top:

I added some pieces of handspun yarn I'd made mostly from bits left over from carding, I spun them quite thickly, and didn't do anything with them after wards, just wound them onto card. This one is on the row of white Chubut, a 'new' to me wool I got from wollknoll, which felts so nicely and looks really nice too.

These are some cotton fibres: cotton top, cotton fibre and cotton nepps on carded Portuguese Merino, with some soy staple and carded Gotland.

If you are interested in trying more fibres in wet felting work, I recently wrote an e-book guide to using them. It features 20 commonly available natural fibres. Have a look at the info page :)

2015 Diaries

If you're stuck for a last minute present I've just added a load of handmade felt diary covers at special prices to my etsy shop. If you are in the UK and order this weekend, I can get them in the post on Monday and fingers crossed they'll arrive by Wednesday. (I obviously can't guarantee that though).

 You can still order them in time for the New Year to do your resolutions, though! They come with 2015 UK diaries, so special dates and listings are relevant to the UK, but the days are still the same! So if you're overseas and don't care about Saint's days, bank holidays or the Queen's birthday or other stuff they put in diaries, I've included overseas postage prices too.

 The diaries are standard A5 size, and the covers are removable, so you can replace the diary each year. Or swap it for a standard thick A5 notebook/journal etc.

Because they are big, they are quite heavy, so overseas postage is a bit pricey. I you are interested in just the cover, contact me on etsy or facebook and I can weigh the cover without the diary and adjust the price/postage. 

There are 7 altogether

 Last one:

 

Bluefaced Leicester and Crimped Viscose Fibre

A couple of weeks ago, I made some felt panels using Yake fibre with Bamboo Staple Fibre, and Bluefaced Leicester with crimped Viscose fibre. This is the Yak piece with Bamboo:

I posted about it on the Felting and Fiber Studio site a few days ago if you want to read more, and I've been uploading my photos to Ipernity if you want to see better photos in more detail. Although Viscose top is very similar to Bamboo top, crimped Viscose fibre isn't quite so similar to Bamboo fibre. There are some similarities, for example the way the strands of fibre curl. Viscose is whiter in appearance than the creaminess of Bamboo, and bamboo appears shiner, catching the light on its crimp. I teased the viscose apart and laid it on top of the Bluefaced Leicester:

This is a close up of the area in the top left corner. I teased the fibres apart and 'fluffed' them up:

This is the area just to the right, I separated the fibres but tried not to lose the curly charecteristics of the strands too much:

This is the area just below, it is a bit denser, but you can still see the characteristics of the fibre:

Just below that is an area where the fibre is sparser, I separated the fibre, fluffed it up and laid it on quite thinly.

This is the area in the bottom right corner, I added some interesting, longer strands of the viscose fibre:

I took a couple of photos of the two pieces side by side for comparison. The Yak and Bamboo is on the left and the BFL and Viscose is on the right. You can see the differences from this one, the bamboo is 'fluffier',  and shinier, and the viscose is whiter and less 'compact'.

From this photo close up, you can see some of the similarities in the fibres' characteristics:

My new favourite fibre, Kapok:

It is so soft, you can barely feel it. I thought yak felt like a kitten's belly, this is twice as soft as that :)