Last Saturday at Seata we had an interesting and informative talk on felt and felting by Karen Lane in the morning. In the afternoon we had a demonstration on Nuno felting and then we did our own pieces. I had done a little Nuno felting previously, so decided to do a vessel rather than a flat piece. I cut a resist from bubblewrap, which was laid on top of a towel and a larger piece of bubblewrap. I’d picked warm / hot colours to reflect the heatwave that we were having, and started laying out the fibres. I laid vertically……
……. then horizontally, using a selection of the yellows, oranges and rust merino fleece that I’d taken.
Once I’d finished laying out the fleece, it was covered in net, and the wetting and soaping started. I’ve always used hot water, but Karen told us that it was better to work more slowly with Nuno, to start with cold water and to work very gently, which was perfect on such a hot day.
Once both sides reached the pre-felt stage, it was time to start adding the fabric. The colours are very autumnal, so I cut out leaf shapes. The bottom leaves on the left are a fine cotton that I dyed in the microwave with pomegranate and orange; the ones above are fine silk from the same dye bath. The rust and yellow are random synthetics from an inspiration pack. More gentle rubbing was next, before rolling and bashing until it was fully felted (fulled). The resist was left inside to help stop it felting to itself.
Then it was cut across the top and rubbed around the edge.
It had felted some of the cotton and silk leaves but not others, nor some of the scraps of wool which I’d spun years ago, the little bit handing on the right hand side. It was strange how some bits had “taken” and others exactly the same hadn’t. It was still wet at this stage and was a bit floppy, so I wasn’t sure if it would stand up.
The bottom is quite sturdy and once it was dry, it stood up pretty well…..
…… in spite of it being very fine in places. I’d also added some snippets of dark red velvet which had felted really well, giving a very textured effect, and some textured yarns which were a bit hit and miss.
It was certainly a learning curve, and a thoroughly enjoyable one. Thank you, Karen.
I’m not sure if I’m going to stitch into it or not, but certainly not yet. I’m really pleased with some of the textures, and can use things that I’d thought wouldn’t work: more to experiment with.
This week at “In the stitch zone” we started a new project, an Upcycled Mandala Brooch. As usual I was grabbing bits of fabric, threads and notions of various types in the last minutes before leaving home, and I ended up with three inspiration type packs, still leaving me with far too much choice and stuff, but not sure what I was really wanting to do.
Alex showed us a few examples and made suggestions of shape and size, and mentioned that they could be attached to a couple of different types of brooch backs, a hair slide or bobble.
I settled on a rusty red piece of dyed(?) calico out of the red pack, and then decided I didn’t really want another brooch, but a hair slide similar to my felted one would be useful. I then went off piste even more with an irregular shape. The tacking lines are the outline of the finished slide (it has a straight piece that goes under my hair in the middle section). The fluffy yarn was only suitable to couch with, but gives a nice texture. The variegated ribbony yarn was best couched with the closely woven calico too.
By the end of the session I had almost couched it all down. The under-and-overs remind me of Celtic knotwork, easier to manipulate than draw!
I had got some beads and other bits with me in the red pack, but think the little gold ones mght get caught up in my unruly curls. Alex had asked what we thought about having another week on this project, as a few folk hadn’t been able to come, and the project for the following two weeks will only take a week to do. We all agreed this was a good idea, and it also means I can find other bits to add when I have a better look in my stash now I know what I’m aiming for.
When Alex first talked about the Spring Board Project I was really keen and fired up about it, a different word each week to prompt a small piece of work which would cumulate into a finished book of some sort. Each week in her newsletter Alex sent us some images and links for the following week’s word. We could all interpret it in any way we chose, something new or not, a stitch or technique, simple or challenging.
Somehow I got off on the wrong foot, having missed a couple of weeks at the beginning of the term, and then often felt over-whelmed by the amount of choice and possibilities for each word that I wanted to try.
I tended to try something experimental that didn’t necessarily work very well, then started working on the pieces of felt I’d done with Karen Lane last summer. It was a bit of a cheat really, using several words on each piece Colour and texture and “Moving on”
Then I found an vintage inspiration pack at Hemswell. The colours caught my attention (the photo at the top), and when I turned it over and saw the fern it just had to come home with me.
It has already been opened and has sparked ideas for the book, and made me want to start with the words all over again. It all needs ironing, of course, but just this piece will do the covers (stretched over mount board) and a couple of pages.
The whole lot talks to me. The more I look at the one on the bottom left, with the rusty coloured hazelnuts, the more it seems familiar. Something my Nanna had in the early 70s? The only one that doesn’t (at the moment) fit in with my vision for the project is the top left fabric. The hanky may become “Fold” and some of the other fabrics layered and stitched for “Cut”. That was another problem I had with it, some techniques cover more than one word, it could also be “Layer”. Decisions, decisions.
I also looked out some paper and old paintings that might be incorporated.
I made a start on some of the words again. “Scrunch”, a piece of hand-dyed scrim from my stash on a piece of brown felt.
It works up very differently from silk velvet which I have used previously with this technique. A few beads or not?
I also remembered that at a S.E.A.T.A. session last summer I tried a tiny piece of weaving in just the right colour. It’s about the size of a 2p piece, and the purple on the left might get taken out or changed in some way.
It has felt like starting a new project, exciting and stimulating, but it’s still a PHD (project half done), and I haven’t started anything new yet this year.
It was a busy time at the Grasby Embroiderers Exhibition last weekend. The first visitors arrived before we were officially open, but it worked well as we were all ready anyway and good to have keen viewers.
There were several bodies of work on display, some of which had not been seen before, including the bras, a fund raiser for Breast Cancer. We had all started with a white bra, the same size (36FF), so plenty of space to stitch. The brief was a famous woman, real or fictitious. We all had completely different ideas which ended in very different looking bras; from the top left: Grace Darling, Claire / Grayson Perry, Snow Queen (mine), Shirley Bassey (Gold Finger), bottom left: Flower Power, and Gertrude Jekyll.
I used white and siver threads to stitch simple snowflakes in various sizes, Angelina fibres to sparkle and catch the light, fluffy yarn to look like snow-drifts, and strings of beads to represent icicles. The bras were stuffed and stitched on to a painted canvas
We each started one body of work (“New Beginnings”) with a pack of black and white threads, fabrics, papers, etc., a different stitch to play and experiment with, a page of quotes for self reflection and the starting point of one of two sayings: “Time and tide wait for no man” or “Castles in the air”. Also we had a white Ikea frame for a piece “Where we started”.
Two thoughts immediately jumped into my head: the song “Both sides now” by Joni Mitchell and the German fairytale castle Neuschwanstein, which we had visited years ago with our German friends.
My stitch was Half Rhodes stitch, a canvas work stitch. This was where my preliminary ideas started, but in my pack had been a piece of wallpaper with half a butterfly on, which I played around with in PhotoShop, mirror-imaging it, horizontally and vertically. This led to the swan pieces below of white on black and black on white in tiny reverse chain stitches. In the other white frame are Lorna’s sand ripples in sorbello stitch (white on white), and in the foreground her “Time and tide” piece.
The red and white box, with silhouette of a castle round the four sides, has a tiny bead and wire red swan on a little mirror hidden in the bottom of the box. The starting points evolve and develop as the work progresses. Most of the rest of the group ended up using colour in their pieces, but it was good to go back to basics and look at line / shape / form and texture, and work in sketchbooks
The flowers and angels were new bodies of work for our exhibition at The Old Rectory in Epworth, but looked different in a different setting and differently staged. My tulip on the left had lost its shape and form a little at Epworth, the humidity had made it wilt. It may need a couple of tiny stitches to anchor it, but so far it seems OK where I have hung it at home. The black cloth makes the other flowers sing, but drains the pale green of my canvas and makes it appear white, at least in the photograph.
I love the bright colours and abstraction of Mary’s angel, a complete contrast to my cream angel with very fine gold thread and simplistic stitching. Her wonderful flower, behind on the right, is so free, and the use of colour is stunning; if I were to try something like that it would look overdone and a mess, because not knowing when to stop would be my downfall.
The lockdown challenges are a riot of colour when all displayed together, just what we needed to keep our spirits up, a surprise through the post each month, giving an ideal opportuntity to experiment and play with some new and different techniques.
The red dado rail behind my “I am little” work was a happy accident, but unfortunately I took the photo before the radiator had been covered with another black cloth. This was part of the “Revisted” project, and most of the others developed earlier work from old sketchbooks and bodies of work from before I joined the group. I took the title of “Portrait” that had been used some time ago. It started at just the right time when we were emptying my dad’s house, and came across my infant school books and old black and white photos of when I was four and five. The title comes from a page in my first school book, with the tiny drawing reproduced on the left and on my name plate.
There was a sales table (fabric, inspiration packs, our postcards) and a tombola, both of which all but sold out. The money from these was split equally between Grasby Church and Breast Cancer.
Tea and coffee, and homemade cakes and biscuits (donations to Grasby Church) with well spaced tables, the weather was bright and sunny, so it was easy to have the doors open for good ventilation. It all felt safe and welcoming, with a steady stream of visitors, but never so many together that it felt crowded.
It seemed that most of the visitors on Saturday and Sunday morning were fellow stitchers, and mainly locals on both afternoons. No rhyme or reason for this, but it was a very friendly atmosphere and lots of the visitors knew one or more of us. It was good to see people that we’d not had any contact with since March 2020 at least, so lots of chatting and catching up, and compliments about the work.
debbidipity 