Textured Nuno Felt

This first piece uses a variety of fabric strips, roughly the same size. I laid out the fabric strips first, then added 4 very fine layers of Merino, which probably added up to being finer than 1 'standard' layer of Merino (the average amount that gets pulled off from standard commercial wool tops, laid out you can't see through it), and not as even. This is the whole piece after felting:

This is the back, you can see that in some places there is hardly any wool at all:

I really liked the texture that was created on the crepey silk fabric strip at the top:

I liked the results of that piece, so I made a much larger one. The finished fulled piece was probably a quarter of the size it was when it was felted, I fulled it on bubblewrap first then on my bead board:

I tried fabric pieces I'd used before, both which I knew felted well, and some which I knew didn't attach well or stayed loose on the edges (a lot of synthetics tend to roll at the edges when torn). I also used pieces I hadn't tried before. I'm not completely sure what some of them are after felting! This is a closer look at the left side, on an angle:

And the right side:

I think this was a piece from a charity shop dress, it was really softly rippled and pillowy:

This is a scarf from a charity shop scarf I love using. You've seen it lots of times, it was goldeny pink open weave, some parts were doubled and some had starnds of golden fibre loose between the layers:

This is one of the synthetics which rolls on the edges (I probaly should have put it in the middle). The outside edge is very loose, but the inside edge was firmly attached:

Looking along the surface, you can see better how high some of the ruffles are:

That photo also shows how much migration there was. It's more apparent depending on the angle you look at it. This shows really clearly just how much there was:

Looking slightly higher you can see more texture on the fabric:

Overall, I liked the piece, especially the texture, though I did think using just one colour of wool  along with the migration dulled it quite a lot, and looking at it on an angle, it does look like it's been under a dusty bed for a few years!

Pink!

 I did try to post this yesterday, but Blogger won't let me upload pics from my computer to add to the post, I hade to use Flickr URLs and Picassa. Is anyone else having problems?

On my last post I showed you a sneaky peek of the ripples and ruffles of the nuno felted piece I made for Ann's challenge on The Felting and Fiber Studio site. Well, here's the finished piece in full:

Here it is from another angle:

It's kind of double-nuno because I started with some pieces of cotton gauze that I'd dyed a while ago. I wanted it to be extra sturdy to make a camera case out of it:

I really liked how it turned out, so I thought I'd make a similar piece. I measured this one carefully to make a book cover out of it. I also added some wisps of orange, beige and white to the merino at each end to match the patterns and colours of the fabric.

You can see the texture more from this angle:

And of course, a supermacro close up :)

I have just one more piece I made from this fabric, but it is still drying. If you're interested in learning more about felting with synthetic fabrics, nuno felting in general or the techniques I used, please have a look at the info about my e-book, Beyond Nuno here, thanks :)