New flickr Group

I started a new group on flickr recently for Handmade Book Covers. We've already got 8 members and lots of great photos of a variety of book covers. If you're on flickr and have made your own cover for any type of book, come and join us and share the photos of your creations, or just drop by to have a look.
And feel free to recommend the group to any of your friends or contacts :)
http://www.flickr.com/groups/handmadebookcovers/

Recycling felt pieces

I like to try lots of different fibres and experiment a bit, so I often end up with quite a few sample pieces or pieces of felt where I like the technique, but don't think the colours worked.
A while ago I made a collage from some of the sample pieces and I really liked it. So when I realised I had quite a lot of sample pieces again, I thought I'd make another collage and this time combine it with my latest obsession-notebook covers.

This is the finished collage piece:

And this is the Notebook cover I made from it:

I measured, and cut out a piece of craft felt to the size I needed before sewing on the felt pieces with 'invisible' thread (like thin nylon beading thread). I also added some handmade yarn scraps. I had intended finishing it off with blanket stitch around the edges, but all the sewing shrank it a little.

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:

Where do your ideas come from?

Do you always know where your ideas came from? Or sometimes do you look at your work and wonder what gave you the idea?
I've just finished a flat needle felted piece I made for the Felting Forum's Monthly Challenge, using only natural fibres. I followed the first design I thought of, I just wanted something that was simple, but would look great with all the tones and textures of different animal fibres, so I just drew a few circles and wavy lines:

I actually stuck to my idea for once too:

But when the pattern started to build up and fill in, it started to remind me of paintings I'd seen by Pintupi artists from Australia. So, I called the piece 'Pintupi' to acknowledge the influence and lasting impression those paintings must have made on me.

That's what got me thinking about where ideas come from, and I remembered a short clip from a Derren Brown TV programme where he turned the tables on advertisers to influence their ideas.

'Pintupi' was made using 37 different animal fibres (for a full list see the photo on flickr), some I'd bought myself, some were from fibre swaps, and some lovely handwashed and handcarded batts in gorgeous shades and tones from my friend Karen.

Felted Foliage

I had an idea a few weeks ago for making a foliage picture with felt. I was having a look through my tub of handmade yarn scraps, and noticed how good they looked where some cut plied ones were separating. I made some patchy green prefelt to cut up for the background, made some twists with merino/silk and merino/bamboo, and coiled some thin merino strands around paintbrushes.

It took SO long to lay out, I was glad when I'd finished:

Felting it wasn't easy as it was so big, I had to lay a shower curtain down on the kitchen floor, and piece together bubblewrap and netting. It was looking good after rubbing and rolling though.

I finished the felting by rubbing on bubblewrap, bit by bit, in 'rows' across the felt, then I rotated it and did the same thing. I was a bit disappointed with the end result, I'd hoped it'd turn out more like the halfway stage, and all the prefelt, twists and yarns I'd added had made it really thick. It's growing on me now, though :)

I had some prefelt and yarns leftover, so I made a few more twists, and tried another version on a blue background, this is a cropped version of it:

Felt Cases

The May challenge on the felting forum is 'Practical Felting- Create something with a useful purpose'. My new camera needs a case, so I thought I'd have a go at making one.
After another fruitless search of the internet for a tutorial, I decided to work it out for myself (apparently, maths can be used for other things besides working out how much fibre I need to order and how much it'll cost!)
So, after lots of measuring, re-measuring, dividing and multiplying, I ended up with.... 2 foam rectangles as resists for a camera case and ipod case.
I won't pretend I ended up with 2 perfect cases after my first try, but they turned out okay and I found they are easy to adapt.


I re-did the camera case a couple of days later with 4 thin layers, and got the size and thickness I wanted.

If you'd like to try making a case with a flat resist, I made a picture set on flickr, here
And if anyone has any tips for making cases- I'd love to hear about them.

I also made a very simple camera case by sewing 3 pieces of felt together yesterday, and made a photo set for this on flickr, too

I must say thankyou to Linda from craft gossip who did a really nice article about me and my felted vessel tutorial :)

And if anyone has any helpful how to's or tutorials they'd like to share, please leave a link in the comments, I'd love to see them :)

Book Review

I'm fairly new to wet felting and don't really know much beyond laying wool tops in opposite directions and incorporating other fibres into the top layer, so I thought I'd treat myself to a book. I had a look on amazon and decided to get 'Complete Feltmaking by Gillian Harris'. It promised to carefully explain each feltmaking technique in detail with step by step instructions so that no matter how inexperienced you are, it is difficult to go wrong. It covers needlefelting, wet felting, knitting and fulling, and advanced felting techniques. Sounded perfect.

I don't know anything about knitting so don't feel qualified to judge that section's instructions, but I've looked through all the wet felting and needle felting projects, and there are some major problems with this book.
The first wet felting instructions are explained quite well, but after that, instructions are vague... 'make a circle, add a spot, make a polka dot, bunch up some fleece into a round pouch shape' etc, and it doesn't tell you 'how'.
Also, the photos are practically useless, instead of a few photos clearly illustrating the instructions, they give a whole page to a photo of the finished item, then use a cropped version again on almost a whole page, where they could have fit another 4-6 photos. The photos they do have accompanying the stages are 'arty' and blurred and contribute practically nothing.

A typical 4 page layout for a project:

Another thing I found strange, was there was no order to the projects, they went from 'intermediate' to 'beginner' to 'advanced' then back again, randomly. The needle felt section starts with an 'advanced' project.
The oddest thing was incomplete instructions for how to make a bag, which were then repeated 10 pages on, this time without the blurry photos but with one additional step-'make a handle using the instructions from a few pages earlier'. This one extra detail took 4 pages.

After reading this book, I'm non the wiser than I was before reading it, and many of the tips go against other things I've read, like leaving felt on resists/lasts to dry (didn't the felt shrink too much for that?)
It's a shame, because the project ideas look really good.