I had the most fun I have had in a long time yesterday! I met up with a friend in my neighbourhood and we spent the entire day wet felting.
When I first arrived, she set me up with a DVD called
On Gentle Threads, a whimsically inspiring short feature on Hungarian felt artist, Judit Pócs, while she prepared the outdoor felting studio. After feeling ready to dive into a bucket of hot, soapy water and squeeze out ten hats, I came out to find that we had a generous-sized table laid out with a pile of clean towels, bamboo mats and homemade soap formula, all ready to go.
Before our felting day, I spent the free moments of this Easter long weekend experimenting with wet felting projects on my own. At first, I grossly underestimated the difficulty of making a simple pouch until my make-it-up-as-I-go attempt failed miserably. I then watched a few videos on YouTube, including this great
Threadbanger tutorial on making a beret, which requires the same techniques.
So I went at it again, making a white pouch with orange stripes that was covered in holes, but at least was less of a disaster than my first attempt, which is still laying in pieces right now on my armchair. I took it to show my friend yesterday who convinced me after a lot of gentle persuasion and persistence to patch the holes and work on it more. I was sceptical it would do any good, but a lot of faith and an hour of elbow grease later, including some great destressing sessions on a washboard, my failed pouch shrunk by a quarter at least (that’s a good thing in wet felting), with all the holes firmly patched, and actually useable now as a sleeve or heatable rice pillow. I was over the moon!
Galvanised by this experience, I made another pouch after the colours of my cat. It ended up shrinking to the size of an iPhone cover, a little too small to use as a rice pillow for us big cats and bunnies, but I thought our Salmon might appreciate it once the winter season sets in.
The homemade soap formula worked a treat. Prior to this, I simply used ordinary dishwashing detergent, but my friend had attended a felting workshop by Janet Page that provided a recipe to make your own soap ‘paste’. It involves adding one part soap flakes to two parts boiling water and leaving the mixture to set in a container. It will become the consistency of sorbet and can be scooped into the hot water when wet felting. I found this recipe much kinder on my hands than detergent and lathered up really nicely. If you live in the Sydney region, Janet Page is running a
workshop in 10 days.
After lunch, we tried dyeing some wool with
Landscape Elements dyes. This is the colour Shell, which turned out a lovely sandy, tea colour.
We are making a joint order of wool together in the following week and will be dyeing more wool to create scarves in time for winter. We found two great designs in
Felt by India Flint and Toyoko Sugiwaka which will be perfect for our next challenge together.
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