I made myself do the ironing before doing any fun stuff on Friday (telling you far more about me than any soul searching blog post might do) ... anyway, in putting stuff away I came across some precious things I had not been able to part with tucked at the bottom of the wardrobe. One of them was a lovely hand printed cotton dress that I bought many years ago in Chandni Chowk in Exeter. It is all thin and very faded but has a lovely paisley type design. So I decided to try another nuno experiment. Here it is all laid out using roving colours to match the design:
Then I had some inspiration for the rolling. I had this cardboard tube with some fabric still wrapped round it on top of the wardrobe, so I covered it with parcel tape to make it waterproof and used it. And it was excellent, very sturdy and meant that I could sit on the sofa ......
and watch Gilmore Girls for the afternoon. And I did end up rolling it **all** afternoon. This was not a good idea as I slipped down the stairs on Monday and bruised my back, so rolling felt for a few hours did me no favours whatsoever.
Again (yet again) in spite of all the hours and checking and turning round, I am only partly pleased. It is bonded quite well but, although when I laid it out it looked like there was quite a covering of roving over the fabric, there are bare patches and the roving had clumped a bit in places. I suppose the plus side is that you are getting the effect of both the fabric colours and pattern and the roving. The down side is that I am getting quite a heap of 'experiments' gathering in my bedroom and am not sure what I am going to do with them.
My other experiment was with a ripped silk skirt. I had to cut it down to remove the damaged fabric so it was this long curved strip. It felted really beautifully, lovely nuno texture on the reverse side, but (there is always a but) I was then not sure about the orange that I used. The fabric was the dark purple and mostly I used other darker roving but then added the orange as an afterthought and now wish I hadn't.
and here is me wearing it. The plus side is that because it is already curved it sits nicely around your neck.
It looks lovely. Forgive me if this sounds like an obvious question, but felting is new to me, I've yet to experiment, but find it all so fascinating. The felt absorbed the colour from your dress that you rolled it in?
ReplyDeleteI like the orange :)
Sorry, it's not clear: this is 'nuno' felt, where roving is layered over fine fabric (usually silk) and the rolling process causes the wool fibres to migrate through the fabric and bond with it, so you end up with something that is part fabric part felt. the idea with nuno is that you can put a very fine layer of wool fibres and create felt that is very light, soft and flexible. if you see my profile list of blogs that I follow there are many other people out there doing wonderful stuff with felt (i spend far too much time looking at what other people are creating but it is inspirational)
ReplyDeletethanks for your visit
Martine