Rat Killin’

My sweetie’s grandfather usually responds, when asked what he’s up to, “oh, just rat killin’.”
I take that to mean a little of this, a little of that—all those things you’ve been meaning to get to but just haven’t found the time for.
So this was a rat killin’ kind of weekend. I

• straightened out and organized a drawer full of hand-dyed fabric;
• ran across some reverse appliqué squares I made forever ago and decided to stitch them together;
• screenprinted Softscrub w/bleach onto some ugly fabric, and paint onto some other ugly fabric;
• played with Neocolor water-soluble crayons; and
• created a felted piece based on an article in a recent issue of Quilting Arts.

The felted piece was SO much fun. I used a fabric base, then machine-felted onto it wool roving, silk roving, yarns, and Angelina fibers. I stamped acrylics onto the felted piece and onto unbleached cotton, then sewed torn strips of the cotton, along with pieces of painted cheesecloth, to the felted base. I stitched on the green squares (more hand-painted fabric that’s been in my stash for forever), made some little “flowers” out of silk rods and cocoons, and then added some hand-stitching with dyed perle cotton. Here is the result:

And here’s a close-up:

I love the way this piece turned out, and it was great to use both my felting machine and some of those materials I’ve been collecting along the way. I definitely think I’ll be making more of these.

Here is a pic of one of the Neocolor water-soluble crayon pieces. This was a technique that I’ve been wanting to try for a while—applying the crayons to a screen, then screening them onto fabric with a transparent medium. I bought some transparent silkscreen medium a while back specifically for this technique, but when the time came I couldn’t find it.

On top of that, I ironed my freezer paper stencil to the wrong side of the screen (the inside, instead of the outside). DOH! Consequently, the results weren’t so good (ok, they’re downright hideous):



The good news is that I managed to fix this piece quite a bit by going back over it with the Neocolor crayons, a spray bottle of water, and a stencil brush. The end result:



Much nicer, don’t you think? I love the sort of ethereal quality of the background that came about because of the weird screening medium I used--a combination of textile and gel mediums.

All in all, it was a pretty fulfilling weekend! I'll save pics of the other projects for another time, when the projects are further along. In the meantime, I think I'm going to quilt up that little pear piece!

Felting Fun

Well, I’m having a blast with the “new” felting machine, and since I realized I needed to lower the foam so that the fabric wouldn’t drag, it works like a dream.

I posted a pic the other day of a piece of felt I had started playing with. I added a little stitching on the sewing machine and turned it into a journal, and here are the results:

Ok, it's not exactly a journal yet, since I need to sew the signatures in (which I intended to do tonight, but I got sucked into the web and so didn’t actually get ANYTHING productive done, and now it’s time to clean the kitchen and go to bed).

Last night I ran across my Quilting Arts magazine article index, so I had to drag out all the back issues and peruse the articles on felting. I’m looking forward to a lot more fun with the felting machine!

A New Toy!

Yippee! I have a new toy!

Ok, I have a reconfigured-converted-really-old-but-practically-free-and-only-slightly-dangerous machine for needle felting!

Here’s the story: after cleaning and organizing my craft room a while back, I made a promise to myself that I wasn’t going to buy any more supplies until I used up (at least some of) what I already had. I can still take classes, but only if I already have all the supplies; and even if I don’t, I have to make do and improvise with what’s on hand. The only thing I’ve allowed myself is fabric, and that’s because I didn’t have much (really!), and I’ve got lots of plans for pieced quilts in the near future. And I’ll miss the Houston quilt show and won’t be able to stock up. And I found some really good sales on good-quality fabric. Really.

So anyway, I was telling a friend how I was looking for an old sewing machine to convert to a felting machine (so I could use that wool and silk roving, of course). And she happened to mention that she had an old Brother machine that didn’t work, but that I could have it if we (meaning my incredibly mechanical partner) could fix it. She didn’t know what was wrong with it, she said, but she had lent it to someone else who “couldn’t get it to sew right.”

I’m guessing the not-getting-it-to-sew-right problem was tension- or needle- or thread-related, because the motor worked just fine, and that’s the only part I was really interested in.

So I ordered a conversion kit online (ok, I said it PRACTICALLY free) for $50, and last night my sweetie set about dismantling the sewing machine and remantling it into a felting machine. There was a lot of banging and greasiness and one minor incident of needle-pricked fingers (hers), and then she was done!

This conversion kit doesn’t come with any sort of needle guard, but we (ok, the mechanical half of we) think we can rig something up and attach it to the presser foot bar. And yes, in the meantime I'm being VERY careful not to needle-punch my fingers, and I'm definitely not allowing the grandkids to use it.

When I tested the machine out last night, I was very disappointed that the fabric “dragged” on the foam. The fabric was actually felting TO the foam, a problem I hadn’t considered. I looked everywhere online to see if someone else had had that problem, but couldn’t find anything. I finally went back to the installation instructions and found an oblique reference to the problem of not having enough “control of the fabric” if the needles were going too far down into the foam. To gain “more control,” the instructions said, just raise the mechanism higher on the bar. Of course, that didn’t work, since the mechanism is as high as it can go on the bar and still allow the wheel to spin, so I pondered the problem all night, in between thinking/dreaming about all the stuff I could needle felt. Around 4 am, I realized that if you can’t raise the mechanism, you have to lower the foam. Problem solved!

This morning I gathered some of my “supplies” together—wool and silk roving, thread, yarn, sheers, felt, etc.,

and proceeded to play:

(yes, I know, very ugly, but we’re going for technique here, not design). I tried felting on plain habotai silk, which gives it a really cool rouched or gathered look; then I threw on wool roving and yarn to see if it would stick. Next, I took a piece of acrylic (craft) felt and started felting wool and silk roving onto it, then added more yarn and more roving:

Lots of fun! I think I’m going to do some stitching on the “flowers” with my sewing machine, then cut them out and add beads to the center and . . . I don’t know, maybe applique them to something.

Then I’m going to try to remember all those cool projects I kept running across that caused me to think, “I really NEED a felting machine!” If you know of any, feel free to send them my way!

I Felt . . .

exhilarated, exhausted, and thoroughly drenched at the end of my full-day wet-felting workshop with Jilly Gully from Outback Fibers. I took an online felting class at Joggles a while back and was pretty disappointed with my samples, so I decided that felting is probably better learned in a live class. Sure enough, I found out that I had been laying the wool roving on too thickly, using the wrong kind of "netting," and that the quality of materials makes a huge difference in the outcome.

Jill had plenty of other tips to help improve my felting, and she has the most beautiful wool and silk roving, dyed silk hankies, and something called Felbi prefelt which is wonderful to work with.

I was off yesterday and so played some more. I used my old, cheap wool from Jo Ann Fabrics for the first piece I felted (no pic here), and it was a big disappointment--the fibers just didn't seem to felt well, and the piece was thicker than I had hoped for. For the next two pieces (below), I used the wool & silk from Outback, and created both pieces on a Felbi prefelt base. They felted like a dream, and I think the pieces came out very nicely. I'm anxious to do something with them; I want to try stitching on a piece to see how that feels and works.