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!

Joys of Accidental Felting OR No Such Thing as a Ruined Fleece

Washing raw fleece isn't the most challenging aspect of spinning, but doing it right isn't always easy and in my case it took a fair bit of learning from a lot of sources.  (Thank you, all you fibre artists out there, for sharing your expertise, especially those who give free advice.) Now that I've washed many fleeces, I can safely say that while I'm better at it than I used to be, I still have a ways to go.  So many types of fleece, each with its own personality.  It's actually a process I really enjoy.  But that's another topic for another day.

Today the topic is a sad event in my fleece-washing history.  Luckily, the world being what it is, sometimes these little sadnesses that seem so heartbreaking in the moment can become happy accidents when seen in the right light.

One of the first whole raw fleeces I bought was from a beautiful Romney ewe from Aspen Grove Farm in Nova Scotia.  It was early in my spinning days.  I had made the natural progression of many spinners from buying dyed wool top to dyeing the top myself, and then on to processing wool from raw fleece.  Because while spinning commercial top offers the charm of ease and speed and a certain quality of texture unrecreatable at home, there's nothing like rolling your own, as they say.

Anyway, blah blah through the early stages of this raw fleece experiment and fast forward to getting home from Nova Scotia with my beautiful Romney fleece.  It was big.  I washed the whole thing at once and through the magic and mystery of the alchemy of wool, hot water, and soap, managed to pretty much felt the whole darn thing despite feeling sure I hadn't done anything wrong.  Bits here and there were okay for spinning, but most of it I couldn't work with.  Lesson learned, right.  I packed it away at the back of my workroom and tried not to think about it.  Onwards and upwards.

But its presence was impossible to ignore because my workroom is TINY and PACKED FULL with yarn and fleece and dye and a sewing machine and craft books and fabric and two looms and a spinning wheel and a drum carder and ... you know how it is.  So even packed away, it was never far and remained buzzing around in my mind, this lovely fleece just waiting there for the next stage of its life -- because it was still lustrous, curly, wonderfully long locks, they were just all stuck fast together at the cut ends.  I had to do something visible with it.  This fleece could not wind up as stuffing.  

Then one day an Etsy friend who was packing up to move sent me a box of felting roving in several colours.  Very kind.  And the blues and greens got me thinking of the ocean, deep waters and slowly grazing fish.  Now it so happens that -- coming from Nova Scotia (which is right on the ocean) and living in Ontario (which is a two-day drive away from Nova Scotia) -- the ocean  and subjects sea-related are on my mind much of the time.  I really miss living out there and I miss those things that you take for granted when the shore is only 20 minutes away.  So getting this shipment of roving with its water colours put in my head an idea for a big felting project of an underwater scene. Suddenly all that lovely Romney fleece calling out to me from its Rubbermaid prison was tangled seaweed waiting for a place to call home.

Jellyfish - total size 50" x 72"

I used every piece of bubble wrap I could find in the house for this, and found  a bamboo roll-up blind on sale just big enough to roll up the whole thing.  I did the wet felting on the floor of the laundry room, either kneeling on my gardening mat firming up the surface of the felt, or sitting on a chair, rolling the bundle with my feet.  When it was dry, I needle-felted the rest.

(top left)

I didn't spend much time planning the layout.  I began adding seaweed and just let myself go.  It was really, really fun.  I also got out all the bits of dyed fleece I had leftover from various yarns I've spun, and some bits that have come in fibre packs I've bought from Etsy, such as the Bitter Peacock and UpCycled Art.  

(top right)

I wanted the fleece to be what the piece was all about, so while I did add some fish -- because I love fish; I like the simplistic shape that suggests "fish" - they're not detailed in themselves except that they're made from pieces of handmade felt that I really like.

(bottom left)

I really like the 3-D effect of the curly Romney fleece as well.  I would go on to say that it's reminiscent of the floating, reaching fronds of seaweed in the Atlantic but it really isn't.  I would do a lot more snorkelling, otherwise.  In fact I find actual North Atlantic seaweed kind of scary and threatening and do my best to avoid it in the water.  Funny that I was inspired to felt an entire tapestry featuring it.  Maybe it's a sign that I've simply misunderstood it all these years and seaweed and I are heading for a future of mutual respect...

(bottom right)

Friendly jellyfish who wouldn't sting anybody

My favourite, though, is this guy.  He really became the focus of the piece, even though he's small relative to the overall size of the wallhanging.  The legs are some crazy alpaca boucle hand-dyed by the Fleece Artist that I had leftover from a scarf I wove years ago for my daughter.  I only had a bit of it left, but I couldn't part with it because the colours and texture are so lovely.  Again, as with the seaweed, I'm not a huge lover of jellyfish.  Not actual ones when they're swimming in the water with me, at least.  On TV documentaries they can be very beautiful.

I loved making this piece.  I was so happy to have all that lovely Romney fleece to dye whatever colours I felt like, and needle-felting it all together with wild abandon was very fulfilling.  I felt rich.

To hang it -- this is always the hard part for me, and I always forget just how hard until I find myself in the midst of trying to hang something again -- I first mounted the felt.  I made a backer with a piece of red upholstery fabric -- I'd been going for purple, actually, or bluish-purple -- something ocean-like -- but this red caught my eye and after much humming and hawing in the fabric store I went with it.  I like how it plays with the other colours in the tapestry.  I sewed a heavy cotton lining onto the back for strength, and invisibly sewed the felt directly onto this backer.  The top is folded over to make a long pocket for a hanging rod.  I used one of those metal wall brackets that are perforated with holes for hanging shelf brackets.  I cut and hemmed five openings along the pocket to expose holes in the rod, and voila -- after an endless afternoon of arguing with my husband about the best placement for the five hooks on the living room wall (these things can be hard on a relationship!) -- we got it hung and this baby's not coming down!

Paper, Felting, and the Wish Fish

I've always liked the story of the Wish Fish.  It's the fairy tale of the poor fisherman who hasn't caught anything in days. Starving, he casts his net one last time and catches a beautiful fish that begs the fisherman to spare his life in exchange for a wish.  The fisherman's wish is that he and his wife not be poor anymore and he lets the fish go.  Arriving home, his shack has been transformed into a nice little cottage and he and his wife have enough to live comfortably.  

Stop.  That's as far as I like the story.  It continues on, perhaps predictably, with the wife saying her husband should have wished for more, and she keeps sending the poor fisherman (still poor, but in a new sense now) back to the sea to call the Wish Fish and up the wish.  In the end, the wife goes too far (she wants to be God) and as punishment for their individual shortcomings they both lose everything and go back to being poor.  Bla bla, it's always the wife who's super nasty in these fairy tales, isn't it?

But the initial bit, the event of coming across an unexpected opportunity in an unlikely place in a moment of great need -- the recognizing of a chance to change your direction and make things different or better or greater -- this I really like.  Because living life, we all come across these opportunities, but we never know where they may lie in wait.  To make it all more complicated, they're often hard to recognize and can require a great deal of courage to take advantage of.  This is what I like about the Wish Fish.  The wise voice saying, Yes, it's me.  Here I am.  Take a chance.

Sometimes I think about opportunities I should have grabbed when I had the chance.  But not too much.  I'm busy enjoying the ones I did grab.  Like spinning, for example, which I came upon at a time in my life when I was very stressed and needing a creative outlet that wasn't too taxing in certain ways, but allowed me to really express myself in others.

Another Wish Fish in my life was paper making, which I learned in Brazil some years ago (another story for another post).  But it began a relationship with handmade papers that I just can't get enough of -- the look, the texture, the weight.  At some point, I decided I wanted to come up with a paper project featuring a Wish Fish.

In an early exploration of this idea, when I was learning wet felting in a class a few years ago, I created this hanging -- not an image of the fairy tale, but someone waiting to find their way.

Wish Fish, wet felting, needle felting, beads, sewn onto paper-covered foam board, 22"x26"
My first attempt at making felt

I continued to let the idea simmer in my head for a few years, feeding it with some really nice handmade papers on Etsy from CotaProducts and  Bonfires.  My original idea had been to embroider the paper, but the red papers tore too easily, and when I layered them on backing paper, it was difficult to sew because of the glue.  The large sheets from CotaProducts are handmade in Africa from recycled cotton and would have been great for sewing, but they happened to be all background papers and not part of what I wanted to sew.  

I did some initial stitching on the tail with a bundle of four metallic threads, then changed direction and used paper cuttings for detail instead.  

The shell beads on the fish's face and in the water came in a fibre pack from TheBitterPeacock on Etsy.  All the papers used in the piece were handmade.

In the end, I decided to incorporate felting with the paper, and wet-felted a frame.  It's four long strips of felt that I needle-felted together and hid the seams with more roving. Most of the roving is from my own hand-dyed fleece, but there is some commercial roving I got from a friendly and generous customer. Then I needle-felted on commercial top to make the patterned edge.  The extra-thick handspun yarn around the edge of the picture was brought back to me from Brazil by my husband.

Wish Fish - total size with frame is 41" x 34"

The patterns for the needle-felted border are copied from Viking carvings.  I got some books on Viking art from the library and sketched out decorative patterns from wood and stone carvings found in archaeological sites.  I like the element of my family heritage that they add to the piece.  

It's hard to make out the moon.  I wrapped shiny silk yarn around batting mounted on a crescent of heavy paper, then glued it onto a cream-coloured circle.  The crescent stands about 1/2" high off the paper.