wet felting day

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.

happy first day of autumn

Finally turned my wet felted balls into acorns!

Unfortunately, the front page headline of the paper today reported that the landfills in my city will be full by 2012. This was allegedly uncovered a year ago in a report that was deliberately hidden to save the State government from embarrassment. When The Cat and I visited the supermarket today, I thumped down my foot and insisted we finally jump on the green wagon and buy canvas bags. At first, The Cat protested because, well, he’s a big fat greedy hoarder (Exhibit A: Cat food. I rest my case), but then I sweetened the deal by buying a thermo canvas bag specially to store the meats and diary. Second to having his cat food stolen, The Cat gets annoyed when his milk gets warm, so he seemed much more content with my decision to switch to canvas bags when I presented him with his thermo one.

wet felting balls

This Bun is a little bit worse for wear this week (but just a little!).  I have juggled tutoring, with data collection, meetings, editing my thesis and teaching training and it feels like I have managed to cram three full-time workloads into the one week.  But please keep your condolences!  I’ve also been feeling exuberant for the opportunity to get out of the house, the exercise and sensory delight of walking through the leafy cobblestone trails of my campus, and the scintillating company of my colleagues and students.

I had a meeting with my supervisors yesterday to receive some feedback for the last piece of work I sent them.  As always, my supervisors were extremely constructive, although honest about the fact that my first draft needed more work, yet they continually praised me for what I did right and assured me that some imperfection and uncertainty is definitely to be expected so that I didn’t walk away feeling discouraged.  Despite this, I have accepted the truth that supervisory meetings are more often than not, very overwhelming for me.  No matter the feedback, you walk away from any (good) meeting with a full plate of work, even if your supervisors gave you detailed and valuable information and guidance to complete them, you’re reminded that you’re treading the deep waters of a PhD.

I have decided that from now on after all my supervisory meetings, my schedule remains clear for me to return home to a hot shower, a cup of tea and a leisurely evening spent watching comedies (I have developed a new addiction to The Colbert Report).

In the morning, I also picked up the felting kit I ordered from Etsy from the post office, but was crushed to find that the seller had forgotten to pack felting needles.  Luckily, she separately mailed them out to me today, and in the meantime I had some fun making wet felted balls for acorns and toys for Salmon!

Although it requires a lot more elbow grease than it looks and my fingers got all pruny after 40 minutes of rolling a wet wad of wool around in my hands (renewed respect for felters!), it was so much fun!  I think I have found my favourite craft.

To make these, all you need is:

• Wool roving, tear into small tufts
• Dishwashing detergent (or soap will do)
• Bowl of hot water
• Bowl of cold water (optional)
• Tea towel

Begin by taking a small tuft of roving, drizzle hot water over it and very gently, begin rolling it in your hands until it starts to form a puffy ball.  Gently tease apart your tufts of wool roving so that they become more like thin sheets and wrap around your loose ball.  Squeeze a small drop of detergent on your hand and keep rolling the ball until it is covered in detergent and begins to lather.  Every now and then, drizzle hot water onto your ball, and keep rolling.  It’s the combination of the hot water, detergent and your rolling that makes wool fibres ‘lock’ together.  Your ball should start to feel more solid and you’ll find you can apply more pressure without crushing it.  Keep wrapping it in sheets of wool until you get the size you want.  Some people recommend dunking or drizzling your ball in cold water to ‘shock’ it and hasten the felting process.  I did find it helps, but it's not necessary.  When you are satisfied with the size, shape and firmness of your felted balls, rinse any excess soap off with water and rest on your tea towel.  Leave in a sunny spot (away from curious cats) to dry.

I found it was very important to begin very gently and gradually build up even pressure, otherwise you get cracks in the ball.  After making 2-3 balls, you will find your bowls water get very soap, after which you don’t even have to add detergent to your balls for them to felt.

I collected some acorn caps last week from a grand oak tree on my campus.  I’ve never noticed the tree before as it’s on my ‘scenic’ route and I used to always be in such a rush to get from one class to another.  I gathered a small handful of caps in my glasses case so they wouldn’t get crushed in my bag, and rinsed them in my leftover bowl of hot soapy water from felting the balls to clean off dirt.  I'll be hot-gluing them to the balls in time for the Autumn Equinox.

I definitely recommend this very tactile and therapeutic craft for anyone, perhaps we can learn together?