well.... I have only felted once before, and that was about 6 years ago, and it was a piece about 40cm square and I discovered that felting would be more enjoyable with someone to talk to while doing all that rubbing!I did swear off it, but forgot about that declaration when I found these lovely pre-felted australian merino wool battings in fabulous colours. I had all kinds of ideas about the lovely forms I'd be able to experiment with.....I conveniently forgot about the process of felting before the making though...
So this piece is about 1.5m wide by just under 2.5m long - I think I should have felted a small sample first, and because it was so big I had to do the initial felting on the floor. Halfway through I decided to fold it in half, as I was supposed to be finishing in an hour for a family lunch and I was nowhere near rolling it up for the next stage.
After rolling it around a tube I then rolled the tube to create the friction and bonding. I have no idea if this is the best/fastest way to do that process, it was just what the instructions said. If anyone has any suggestions, please share!! I did it by watching two movies, Little Miss Sunshine (which wasn't what I predicted at all, I'd recommend it) and the Matrix, cause xkcd reminded me that it's been 10 years since it came out, and I wanted to see if it was as cool as my 19y0 self thought it was. We poked fun at it a lot, but it got my mind off the felting.
I then microwaved it for a bit and bashed it around, but looking at it the next morning, it doesn't really look like felt. So it's been suggested that I boil it heaps and shock it a bit. I'll put up the results in part 2 (once I get the dying pot out of the cellar). It's currently 1m x 1.4m so I don't think it's really shrunk as much as it is supposed to.
I like the idea of working with the material, but not sure about doing the process myself.... I want to play with the end product! Perhaps I distract too easily.
I also put in the autumn vegie garden, which probably sounds strange to people who live in snowy winters, but here it's our prime growing season, as summer is just so hot, and with the water restrictions I believe it's really crazy and irresponsible to try and grow things when you have to use so much water on them and they still fry under 45C + temperatures day after day. I get too depressed seeing all the brown things, so I let most of my garden go fallow, and celebrate when the rains come again.
We only made a small one this year, just things that you can continually harvest, sugar snap peas, broadbeans, spinach, chards, lettuces and pak choi. I'm waiting til they look a bit bushier and then I'll take some snaps of the garden, also, we had to enclose the patch because our neighbour's cats like to sneak in and use our yard as a litterbox, and they love freshly dug earth, because they are lazy yucky creatures. You can tell I've really been turned off cats by these pair.
Other than that, I've just been propagating the succulents and splitting a lot of my other plants, just to bulk up the space and because I'm sick of trying new things and watching them fail, at least with my own plants, I know they'll work!
that's a really huge piece of felt for a try. sure to discourage even the most diehard felter. but i was similarly ambitious, on my first try i felted a rug. it's close but still not quite finished.
ReplyDeleteshocking is a good idea but the more you shock it the scratchier it will get, so be cautious.
you can roll it up and get a few friends and some iced tea, set the roll on the ground and you and your friends on a bench above and roll it back and forth underfoot (well wrapped) for a bit of a felting party to ease the work a bit :)