More Dryer Felting and Felt Tapestries

Detail from my ultimate project for today's entry

I recently made a small felt wall hanging for one of my sisters on her 50th birthday.  It's had me thinking about felting and making hangings that feature words and symbols instead of pictures.

She's lived a lot since this photo was taken, but hasn't changed so much... I think pictures are forever.
Finished piece measured about 18" x 12"

I love embellishing the felt by needle-felting in handspun yarn and roving.  I attached the photograph on by punching holes around the edges and then needle-felting a continuous length of handspun yarn in the holes and into the felt around the edges to look like big stitches.

The symbols I copied out of books of Viking wooden carvings.  I like not only that these are old motifs, but I love the flow of intertwining knots.  Someday I'll do a huge piece with knots all around the border.

I particularly love this symbol, which is 
St. John's cross and represents
happiness (well I guess it wasn't 
St. John's cross to the Vikings! But 
they used it in their art work all the same.)

So after my recent experiment felting in the dryer with Pellon I got to thinking. Since the Pellon disappeared immediately once it got wet, why bother with the Pellon at all?  Why not just unroll a batt, wet it, and throw it in the dryer?  Batts can be so marvellous just on their own, it would be a really fun way to make felt.

So as an experiment, with as little manipulation as possible, I laid out a basic batt of carded wool (didn't want to use a MARVELLOUS batt in case it turned out a disaster) ...

... added some uncarded locks for colour and texture ...

... and tacked it together here and there with a felting needle.  I tried not to do too much tacking and manipulating, because I wanted to see how successful this method could be at its simplest.

Here it is above, laid out on a cut-open garbage bag on a towel in my tub, after wetting it down with cold water.  Then (below) I folded the garbage bag down over the top.

Rolled it up around a towel

And tied it shut with butcher cord. 

After it was in the dryer (no heat) for 20 minutes or so, I could tell from the edges sticking out that it had felted and was ready to come out.

When I took the piece out, I held it up to the light to see how evenly (or unevenly) it had felted.  I could see that where I had put the ties, the felt was much thinner.

So I decided to do some fulling by hand to tighten the fibres a bit.  I dunked the piece in warm water and threw the piece down onto my felting tray, which is actually a textured boot tray, about 50 times.  I kind of like doing this -- it's not hard work like hand rolling is.

It pulled the piece together, but there are still thin places where the ties were, as well as some other thin places.  I think the other thin places are because I just unrolled the wool batt instead of layering on tufts of wool at right angles, as usually done in wetfelting.  Still a lovely piece of felt.

Here it is dried and ironed

And then embellished by needle-felting on some handspun yarn.  The large spiral is a Viking sun motif, and in the top right-hand corner there is the cross of St. John again, symbolizing happiness.

I like the effect of the multicoloured yarns against the textured background.  I messed up the cross, though, as you can see, one of my over-and-unders should have been an under-and-over...

... but that's all right, especially with the lovely textures of the handspun boucle, which I'm kind of fascinated with spinning right now.

I sewed a simple pocket on the back to hold a hanging rod.

Now I wanted to try to make a piece of dryer felt with no thin spots from string, and no thin spots from the quick and dirty method of just unrolling a batt and felting it as is.

I'd been thinking about making a two-piece hanging for my kitchen wall to feature one of my favourite quotes from M.F.K. Fisher: 

"I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world.”

So I began with two batts of light turquoise Ile de France wool:

... added at right angles other turquoise-blue rovings and cardings ...

... and finished with some uncarded dyed fleece, tacking it all together with a felting needle.

This time when I rolled it up for felting, I put the roll in a control knee-high stocking and tied it shut.  

It worked perfectly!  No thin spots from ties or roving holes, and the stocking was tight enough that the fibre didn't slide around inside the roll, which I had been afraid of.  

The yarn I used for the text is some leftover handspun I'd made to knit my daughter a hat last winter.  The yarn on the border is Navajo-plied, and because it has such a round three-ply structure, it kept its roundness even after needle felting, which I like.  

I wish I could get these pics to sit side by side in this blog as they will on my kitchen wall, but they just don't want to, so it makes it tricky to read the quote  ...

My kitchen is painted a deep purple, so I'm looking forward to seeing these colours up on the wall.

Here's my St. John's cross again, this time done correctly and laced in a circle, which is also a motif I've found in books on Viking work.

Now on to my next project ... I'm thinking either a coat or a patchwork felt blanket ...

Dryer Felting - New to Me and Way Easy on the Arms

I love handmade felt.  I love the colour possibilities and vagaries of intertwining strands of hand-dyed fleece.  I love needle-felted embellishments.

But the actual process of wet felting is arduous for me and I seem to have enough aches and pains as it is without leaning over a countertop and rolling (and rolling and rolling) wool into felt for half an hour.  So I was very excited to come across this artfelting tutorial by Karin Skacel on a Knitting Daily episode on YouTube.  In the tutorial, they use some special paper to hold the wool roving in place before rolling it up and throwing it in the dryer.  After the roll is felted, they pour on boiling water to dissolve the backing paper.  She notes that it can leave a sticky residue but you should be able to rub most of it off.  While I was very interested to try this easier-on-the-arms-and-back felting method, the words "sticky residue" and "wool felt" juxtaposed so casually give me the creeping heebie jeebies, so I cast about for an alternative to the backing paper.

I decided to try Pellon Wash-n-Gone water soluble fabric stabilizer.  What's the worst that could happen, after all?  A big soggy mess plastered inside my dryer, time spent, a lesson learned.  Pshaw, says I.  Getting my hands on a 50 x 50 cm square (19 x 19") piece to experiment with, I embarked on this felting expedition. 

First step on the tutorial is spreading a wool batt out on the fabric stabilizer, which is a lot like fabric and therefore I think it would be nicer to use than paper anyway.

I dyed this white and grey fleece red and it came out this lovely darkish red colour

On the tutorial, it says you only have to tack the roving in place here and there with a felting needle just to keep it from sliding around.  I limited myself to minimal tacking because I really wanted to check out this method as described, to see if it really is that easy.  I felt like doing a lot more tacking but you'll be happy to learn I remained strong and resisted the temptation.  I did not do the criss-cross of roving that you usually do when wet felting; I just laid out the batt and tacked it in place.

Here's an action shot of some hands-free tacking

After the batt was in place, I raided my big bag of wool gatherings that I've cleaned off my drumcarder and my combs and added more colour, tacking these bits in place as well.

Proper action shot to keep you riveted

When I was done it was pretty lumpy and bumpy.

Then I added some yarn I had spun.  I was interested to see how well this felting process would incorporate something that distinct into the piece. 

Again, I tacked it in place with the needle, using a bit more care with the yarn than I did with the batt and roving.  It's still pretty loosely in place, though.

Next I forgot to take pictures for the following sequence so this is a RE-ENACTMENT.  I laid a wet towel in the bottom of my laundry/crafting tub (I'm lucky enough to have a waist-high bathtub as a laundry tub -- long story somewhat revealed in this blog entry.).  On this I set my felt-to-be, and I carefully poured cold water all over it, making sure it was all soaked through, but also making sure I didn't mess up my design.  Yes, I said cold water, and no, there's no soap in it. Then I laid a piece of plastic on top.

This is a cut-up garbage bag which is exactly as wide as my piece.  I wished it had been wider, because edges of my felt (remember I have yarn all along the edges) were kind of sticking out.  I envisioned the yarn sliding out and just felting to itself in a big mess.  If you're the kind of person to get anxious ahead of time over negative foreshadowing, allow me to set your mind at ease -- nothing bad happened because of my shade-too-narrow plastic bag. It is something to keep in mind for future activities, though.

Now you need a centre core around which to roll up the wool.  I used a rolled wet towel placed at one end. I don't know why I wet it - it made everything much heavier.  This might have made for a more vigorous thwapping around inside the dryer, but next time I may try a dry towel and see if there's any difference.

When I got to this stage, I noticed that the fabric backing already seemed  to have dissolved in the water.  Yikes!  But it was okay.  I kept rolling and everything held together.

The piece of plastic has to be long enough to continue wrapping around the outside until the entire piece is wrapped in plastic. 

Now the re-enactment is over and we're back to the actual wet stage of felting inside the craft tub.

Here's my wet parcel laid out in the bottom of the tub

I tied it tightly with butcher cotton in several places.  In the tutorial, she slides the roll into a leg of pantyhose instead of using string.  But pantyhose is one of those things I gleefully gave up many years ago so I don't have any kicking around the house.  Plus given that my piece is so much larger (and heavier) than the one in the tutorial, I worried the hose wouldn't hold it together well enough.  She suggests elastic bands as an alternative, but I went with string.

Note that there's an inch and a half or so of  wool beyond the outer ties - I was worried
that those edges would be lost as the wool slid out of the plastic in the dryer

This wet bundle went in the dryer for 20 minutes with no heat.  I checked it by sticking my fingers inside and seeing if they encountered loose roving or solid-feeling felt.  It kind of seemed fine, but I decided to put it back in for another 10 minutes.  When it came out I unrolled it carefully -- it was still completely soaking wet, of course -- and to my joy and delight it had felted perfectly!   

You can see it did shrink a bit, as it started out just as wide as the plastic.

Here's the back side, a nice solid piece of felt.  You can see the four ridges where the strings were tied around the bundle.  Held up to the light, the felt doesn't seem much thinner here, and they ironed out fine.  I might experiment with elastic, though, or even stockings to see if I can get rid of these ridges while still keeping the wool more or less in place during the thumping dryer-felting process.  All said, this is definitely the easiest piece of felt I've ever made.

I ironed it a bit on the back to smooth out some of the wrinkles from where the ties were.  Even the squiggly yarn going around the edges had felted really well into place.  There were only a few places where it needed fixing with a felting needle.

Then I needle-felted in some surface texture.

And added a much-loved quotation from Mary Randolph Carter that always makes me feel better when a certain aspect of my life gets me down.

It's crucial to keep the important part in mind, right? So leave the tidying for another day!

Create!

What Went Into That Batt - Two Art Yarns

Bulky Two-Ply Yarn HERE

Corespun Yarn HERE on Etsy

 So I've been a bit less than productive recently for various reasons, and thus have fallen a bit behind in both spinning and blogging. Life can get complicated, as we all know.  I'm always appreciative of the calming influence spinning lends to my mental knots.














These two yarns have been sitting in my ready box for awhile.  You can tell they  came from the same family, can't you?  But a different feel, a different heft, different use, and all in the way they were spun.  The fellow up above was plied and one to the right corespun.  One day soon I'll do a little entry on corespinning but this blog is all about putting together the batts they came from.





I was dreaming about some purple yarn, and wanted to use these lovely fleeces, being as they were colours I couldn't resist.  My idea was not to card them, or hardly at all, just run them through the carder along with a bunch of other wool and hopefully keep some of the curl and lock integrity.

Border Leicester/
Bluefaced Leicester Cross

Border Leicester/
Bluefaced Leicester Cross

  

So for me, designing a batt for yarn involves my starting colour idea (in this case purple) and unloading all my bits of this and that in purple that I've dyed and put away, digging through it all and seeing what I like and what will work and what I feel like using.  Sometimes my idea changes as I find fleeces I'd forgot I had that overpower my initial impulse.  One bag of lovely I found in this exercise had some lovely purple dyed locks that had done me the wonderful favour of fracturing (I do believe that's what happened), which is when the dye kind of splits up into its composite colours. Aren't they great?

These locks were dyed in the same pot, but because I don't stir almost at all during the dying process, they came out very differently from different corners of the pot.  As for the fracturing, that's from the amount of citric acid I used, or the heat, or some chemical issue or other ... dyeing is still a brave new world of adventure for me - I love it! Taking some of the lighter and some of the darker and combing it all together produced the combed top up above.

After I collecting some purples, I cast about for some other colours I felt like adding, and came across some lovely Cotswold I got from Wooly Wool of the West and dyed this fabulous golden yellow.  And there's no coming across something like that in your stash and putting it back again, so into the pile it went.

It's combed into top on the left, and in its curly glory on the right

And then all of a sudden I was hit by grey fever, and absolutely needed some grey - natural grey, the kind sheep grow all by themselves, instead of those rendered grey by me through the magic of Jacquard acid dyes.  In fact, my grey fever was such that I'm going to have to make some grey yarns pretty soon -- all grey with this and that here and there.  But in this particular purple creation, grey will be a condiment.   

Shorter stapled (the staple is the length of each
individual strand of wool), super kinky (that's the crimp)
and oh so soft

Longer staple, more lustrous, soft but not as soft
as the darker fleece

These are both BFL (Bluefaced Leicester)--Shetland cross fleeces from Jody's Little Smoky Blues.  So for those of my friends who are kind enough to read this and don't understand what I'm talking about when I say things like that, a crossed fleece is the result of different breeds of sheep having offspring.  Their wool can have aspects of one or both of the parents to varying degrees.  Look at these very artistic comparisons:

Uncombed locks - quite a difference, even though they're both BFLxShetland

Woolen Fiddleheads - you can tell which combed top
came from which fleece - they're both soft and wonderful to spin,
but the left is more lustrous, and the right is softer

But oh my, because now your eyes have seen so much grey it's hard to remember what we're aiming for.  Maybe it will come back if you see all the combed and carded fibre ready to be put together into a lovely batt -- and a batt is made when you card (kind of like brushing) together wool so it more or less is kind of all running in the same sort of direction.  Not perfectly, but more or less.  You can do these with locks of wool to help open them up and make them easier to spin (like brushing your hair makes it easier to get a job, maybe) or with wool that's already carded or combed to mix together colours and amalgamate it all together.

Lovely purples nestled in amongst my golden Cotswold, some red Romney lamb locks and golden-orange Border Leicester x BFL (and now you know what the X means), my purple locks that started it all, and my grey-fever greys, which also includes some uncarded locks there on the left

This went only once through the carder
to maintain texture and colour integrity
to a certain extent

Now for carding fun - I wish batts were easier to see in photographs -- you can never see very much of a batt in one shot PLUS for me, I just have to touch everything so just looking can be very frustrating... At any rate, I got a lovely mix of purples for depth and subtle shifts in purpleness, plus kapows of other colours all throughout.

Now it's time to spin.  For my plied yarn, I spun one ply -- a thicker one -- from the batts I made here:

This is a strip from the batt (I just pulled away a strip of wool straight through the 
thickness of the batt) alongside my yarn still being spun on the spindle

The second batt, and the wools that went into it - I carded this twice, to blend the colours more.  The dark burgundy in the middle is actually a blend of BFL and silk - the only mill-carded wool I used

Then I needed a second strand of yarn to ply (twist together with) the first.  I wanted it thinner and less poppingly colourful, so I carded together the wools on the right to get the batt here on the left, and here it is below on my wheel being spun:

 Plied (or twisted) (or spun) together:

Fibres include Romney x Merino, Corriedale, Cotswold, Romney lamb, Border Leicester x Bluefaced Leicester, Bluefaced Leicester, Bluefaced Leicester x Shetland, Silk

And here below is the corespun yarn, a blog entry about this method of spinning is in my future.  Very quickly, in spinning this kind of yarn, the wool is wrapped around a central yarn (or core) of some type, so the angle of wrapped fibres is different than the twist of regular yarn, the colours show up differently and the yarn hangs and works differently.  

Now that you've seen where they came from, here are my yarns again, washed and dried and ready to go:

Plied Yarn available from my Etsy shop - a 47-yard skein, super bulky at 3-4 wpi

Super bulky, as you can see!

And here's the corespun with bright zinging colours - also in my Etsy shop
this one is  60 yards long, and chunky weight (5-6 wpi)