Better

Here's yesterday's fabric overdyed in Landscape "grevillea" and "galah". This is more like the sorts of colours I was looking for. The landscape dyes are named for Australian flora and fauna, but in my mind this is very much a fruity-berry colouring. Now to do some measuring to see if there's enough fabric there to follow through on my plan. It wouldn't have been worth doing the measuring before the dyeing--even though that would seem logical--because I had no way of knowing how much shrinkage I'd get. Even though the jumper was already "felted" in the washing machine, it's now had three sessions in the dye pot and two more spin cycles in my front-loader. And, yes, I do realise I haven't mentioned what project I have in mind . . . I'll wait until I've measured it before I commit myself.

Felting Fun

Saturday morning's session at the Guild was a basic felting workshop. When I first saw felting in the Certificate Spinning program I was rather unimpressed. There are so many aspects of spinning to learn and develop. Why spend a morning on felting? But by the time we got to Saturday morning, I'd decided to suspend any didactic criticism and just go with the flow. I'm glad I did. Basic felting was easy and fun. And, look what I made! It's a nuno felted scarf. There is a layer of black silk voile sandwiched between the two layers of lightly felted merino tops. On one side I've added wisps of silk tops for embellishment. It's in my sea-jewel colours and I'm looking forward to wearing it. And, it was an easy enough exercise that I've already started inviting friends to come and have a go. I'm sure there's a lot more to felting than this, but it was great to have a taster and pick up a new skill. After a hectic and stressful couple of months the activity just suited my mood. So, thanks for the felting workshop!

Next class is all about dyeing. That's another one to make me happy, and then, believe it or not, it will be the end of the year!

Encore!

Just one more pic from the Fashion Parade:

This marveous felted wrap . . . I'm sorry, I don't have any details. All I can tell you is that it's felted and its WOW!

Apart from the colour, it's the drape and texture of this piece that impress me most. It seems that felting is getting more and more popular and more and more subtle. There's one day set aside for felting in our Spinning course. My first reaction was, "why a day of felting, when there's so much to learn about spinning?", but now I'm looking forward to getting just a taste of this versatile craft.

Reverse Psychology

This is the front of the bag in which I've been keeping the Cockatoo Quilt: I made it the day I washed my first fleece. It's a crazy bag and I made it by crazy process of reverse psychology . . .

I'd been warned to prevent felting when I washed my fleece. I'd read that temperature changes and agitation were the main things to avoid. So I was very, very careful. I used lukewarm water to soak the fleece overnight; I handled it gently, and all the time I was anxiously looking out for any signs of felting--not that I really knew what to look out for. By the next afternoon I had a clean, unfelted fleece and a body full of anxious energy.

With the washing safely out of the way, I decided to give vent to some of my pent up energy. I took a few handfuls of fleece and determined to find out what I would need to do to make it felt. I let myself loose on that fleece for an hour or so.

• I lathered it with soap,
• I poured boiling water on it,
• I rubbed it and scrubbed it

. . . I treated it as badly as I knew how . . . and still it hardly felted. But I did feel better. Then I spread the wool roughly over a rectangle of gold coloured fabric, I added scraps of silk and stitched it all down with variegated cotton thread. Another piece of fabric and a ribbon handle and there was my crazy bag. I'm more confident handling fleeces now, but the crazy bag is still lots of fun.