Felting with C and M

Today I am home with some visitors and when they tired of watching children's telly I offered them the chance to get a bit messy. So I got out the stash and we had fun messing around with fluff. C chose an abstract 'nature' theme for his design:

Little M (to distinguish her from my M) chose to do a flower picture.

I took a bit of handspun that I made the other day from my rainbow roving and just spiralled it around itself.

I had been trying to do some 'proper' spinning, having discovered that I have been doing it all 'wrong'. I am left handed so I tried to spin by drafting with my left hand, except I just found it kept breaking as I could not balance the spinning speed with drafting the fibre at the right rate. So in the end I abandoned the experiment and went back to using my own method (which is totally pre-drafting the fibre and having it in a fluffy pile next to me as I spin) and used the tatty bit I had made for this project.

This is how they looked when we had finished. C and little M enjoyed getting very soapy and 'shocking' their felts.

I had also been browsing felting stuff the other day and wanted to post this link as I found it so inspiring and quite helpful, in terms of a method for doing larger more ambitious projects. It shows an Iranian felt rug maker doing a traditional design rug: Namad The site is called Peace Industry and it is a couple who are trying to revive the use of traditional felt rug making techniques.