When things don’t work out
27 Jan 2012 5 Comments
in felt Tags: felt, Grayson Perry, muslin, nuno, resists, scarves, silk
I was reading a post by Karen over on The Felting and Fiber Studio about a felt album cover she’s been making, where she keeps changing the design and unpicking the embroidery because she doesn’t like it. I know how she feels.
Before Christmas I made several manly scarves in various colour combinations, and they were very popular.
So I thought it was time to try some variations on the theme – but they haven’t worked out.
The first variation was using a preprinted silk scarf, using undyed merino. I didn’t like the result at all – the shapes and the colours just didn’t work together:
Then I tried using muslin with a more open weave. This was a bit tricky to work with, especially when it was wet, as it kept clinging to itself and was difficult to keep flat in one layer. Also, I had a problem with the wool, as the colour started leaching out when I wet it. You can see a bluish tinge where the muslin has taken up the colour on the left-hand side of the photo below:
(When I contacted the supplier about this, they said it was possible that an over dye had been used on it and that a small amount of excess was washing out. Has anyone else experienced this? It’s never happened to me before.)
The much more open weave of this muslin meant that with a bit of careful effort I could squeeze the plastic resists out through the muslin without cutting it (though it did leave a bit of a hole in some cases). I rather like the more subtle spot effect; up close it looks quite cellular.
However, because the muslin is so loose I think it would catch on things quite easily and become very irritating.
So I decided that maybe it was time to move on and try something else. Instead of changing materials, I changed the shape of the resist. Although I originally intended it to look like tiger stripes, I didn’t allow enough for the muslin to shrink, and the nuno areas are smaller than I planned, relative to the stripes. But in these colours it reminds me of the opening credits of The Simpsons – so welcome to my Clouds range!
When things don’t work out, it can be a chance to review your technique or rethink your design. But sometimes it may just give you a gentle nudge in a completely different direction. Some of my most interesting work has resulted from pieces that didn’t work out as planned – and in textiles that seems to happen more often than not!
I went to a talk by Grayson Perry at the British Museum just before Christmas, where he said it can be heartbreaking to spend a week on a piece that just doesn’t work. So it happens to everyone!
Morley Winter Fair
03 Dec 2011 1 Comment
in markets Tags: felt, Morley College, pots, scarves, winter fair
I’ve got a stall at Morley Winter Fair tomorrow – details above.
I’ll be selling a selection from my new range of manly scarves, along with felt pots, purses, and spectacle cases and smartphone cases made from recycled plastic bags and maps. Hope to see you there!
Felting books
23 May 2011 Leave a Comment
in felt Tags: book review, electric sander, felt, scarves, shibori
At the weekend I picked up a second-hand copy of Fabulous Felted Scarves by Chad Alice Hagen and Jorie Johnson. What I found fascinating was not just the ideas for different scarves (network felt made by winding strands around giant bubble wrap, plaited felt, shibori felt) but also the techniques they use for making felt. This includes speeding up the process using a portable electric sander.
I’m a bit wary about mixing electricity and water, but anything that helps speed up the process and saves my back must be worth a try. Nancy E Schwab, who also reviewed the book, used to have some great tips and tricks on making nuno felt on her blog. But she’s now pulled them all together in her own book, incidentally called Nuno Felting Tips & Tricks, which sounds worth a look.
And last but not least, Nicola Brown of Clasheen has teamed up with another felter, Chrissie Day, to publish From Felt to Friendship, which includes an amazing felt bag incorporating fish skin. I haven’t bought this book yet – have to pay off my holiday first! – but an order will soon be winging its way to Ireland.
Home-cooked shibori
29 Mar 2011 2 Comments
in felt Tags: cooked shibori, net, nuno, scarves
Next term at Morley College we’re going to be looking at shibori dyeing, a technique that uses tying, pleating, stitching and wrapping cloth before dipping it in indigo it to produce pattern and texture – I’m really looking forward to this.
But this term I’ve been using a similar technique, without the dye, on nuno-felted net scarves to produce pleats (it also softens the net). After tying the scarf around a piece of plastic drainpipe, I put it in a tea urn for about an hour to steam. You can see the result left.
However, the term is now finished and I want to make some scarves to sell at Spitalfields. So I had to find a way of doing ‘cooked shibori’ at home without a tea urn.
Improvised shibori steamer
My first thought was to use a large stockpot, but the tallest one I could find was only about a foot high. Because the idea is to steam the scarf, not immerse it in the boiling water, you have to leave the part of the drainpipe that stands in the water uncovered by fabric, so this would have severely limited the width of the fabric you could use to about 9 inches (maybe slightly more once it’s bunched up).
Then I spotted an empty 20-litre tin of cooking oil that had been thrown out by a restaurant. This was much taller – around 15 inches – and seemed perfect. So I got Ever Supportive Partner (ESP) to carry it home and remove the top with some tinner snips. I then tested it by adding hot water to a depth of about three inches, draped a towel over it and added the lid from my largest frying pan and voilà – a home-made shibori steamer!
Scarves wrapped around drainpipes ready to steam
I bagged a leftover piece of drainpipe from another friend, wrapped and tied a scarf around it and put in the steamer to ‘cook’ for an hour. Interestingly, when it came out, the pleats were less defined than the scarf I steamed at college.
I speculated that there could be a couple of reasons for this. One was that at college I used paper string, which is quite thin and flat. At home I used a thicker, rounder string, so the creases would probably be less sharp. The other reason could be that the drainpipe at college had about twice the diameter of the one I used at home. This means that there were more layers of scarf for the string to resist on the home-cooked scarf, so the creases in the bottom layers may not be as sharp.
I couldn’t lay my hands on any wider drainpipe, so I re-steamed the scarf using the thinner paper string – and indeed the creases came out a bit sharper. You can see the different results below (sorry for the poor quality of the pictures).
Scarf pleated with thicker, rounder string
Scarf pleated with thinner, flat paper string
Scarves
27 Mar 2011 3 Comments
in felt Tags: bags, cooked shibori, Morley College, network felt, nuno, scarves, shibori, Spitalfields
The exciting – and rather scary – news is that I and Tess, a fellow student on the creative and experimental textiles course at Morley College are going to try selling of our stuff at a stall at Spitalfields Market. We’re going for a Friday, as it’s cheaper than a Sunday, so we won’t waste too much money if nobody buys anything.
This has thrown me into a panic about having enough stuff to sell. Tess makes beautiful felt hats and bags and has been planning to do a stall for a while, so she’s built up a bit of stock. We agree that our styles are different, so it doesn’t matter if we both make the same kinds of items, as long as our prices are comparable. But I thought I’d try to make some scarves, to add a bit of variety.
The problem with making felt scarves at home rather than at college is that they require a lot of space, especially as you have to make them longer to allow for shrinkage. Working on my dining room table (the largest area available) means lots of folding over bubble wrap, pulling corners here, rolling edges there – all while trying to avoid pools of soapy water dripping onto the floor.
The other issue is seasonality – with the weather getting warmer, people won’t want to buy thick heavy scarves. So I made a couple of lighter ones in network felt (below), the blue one with silk threads running across some of the holes. I’m not sure it was that successful – it probably needs more silk to avoid simply looking messy.
I also really liked the pleated nuno net scarf I made using the ‘cooked shibori’ technique of tying it up and steaming it. So I made a couple of larger shawls at home and tied them up and steamed them in the tea urn at college.
The next challenge is whether I can do this ‘cooked shibori’ technique at home, as term has now finished. I don’t have access to a tea urn, so will have to improvise somehow.
Alternatively, we can just sell bags and hats.
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