First Felt-Making Class

Last night was my first felt-making class. We were instructed to bring along an eclectic group of objects ranging from large sheets of bubble wrap, a rolling pin and a bar of soap (preferably olive oil) to a plastic milk bottle with two lids! This last one intrigued me no end and I couldn’t wait to find out the purpose of the second lid!

Looking at the pieces of roving that I had dyed:

I realised that the dyeing process had started to felt the fibres; not seriously as they could still be pulled apart, but it was noticeable. This happens very easily, however careful one is with minimum handling and manipulation of the fibres. I decided the only answer was to card them, which I then proceeded to do, and this separated the fibres again, but turned the rovings (with the fibres running parallel to the length of the roving) into rolags (short lengths with the fibres running around at right angles to the length) – these latter are what are produced from the carding process, and are used by spinners. It completely dealt with the felting problem and the wool ended up incredibly soft and aerated.

Here is my box, all packed up and ready to go for the class.

You can see the bubble wrap on the left, then my apron, some dyed wool, a piece of foam (for needle felting, which we didn’t do tonight), a glimpse of the rolling pin, and finally the famous milk bottle! Everything else is underneath.

My hubby drove me over, and it was really quite near where we live – a beautiful modern school with lots of fantastic facilities. Our class was held in a room fitted out as a woodworking workshop with lots of benches with vices on them, but there were also lots of tables and chairs, and a sink for water, so it was ideal, as we each had a table to work at.

There were nine of us in the class – a very nice number – enough to make a good class but not so many that you didn’t get individual attention.

Our teacher is a very nice lady who told us that she also teaches mosaics, candle making and soap making, and was very delighted that she had been asked to teach the felt-making class because she loves it so much.

Tonight’s assignment, as stated in the instruction sheet for the course, was to make a scarf in autumn colours, but as it turned out, we were allowed to be a lot more flexible than this. We had been told to bring along some Merino rovings in various colours, but the teacher set up a large sale table and there was plenty of wool to buy if anyone had not managed to get any.

I decided early on that I didn’t really want to make a scarf, mainly because it is quite a long piece of felt and I wasn’t sure how well my arms would hold out, and also I’m not really a scarf person, unless it’s very cold weather! Also, I realised pretty soon on that I didn’t have enough of any one colour to give cohesion to the design, so I opted for a smaller, rectangular piece which could end up as a small hanging, or be used for other purposes. Anyway, tonight’s class was an introductory session just to give us a feel for the medium, and to experience the technique of wet felt making for ourselves. As for the autumn colours, only a few people followed this guideline and there was plenty of variety besides!

The first 40 minutes of the class was taken up with the teacher showing us the various pieces of felt that she’d made, ranging from scarves to 3-D flowers, and little pictures to bags. She then explained the basic principles of felt making, and what makes wool felt, and then she did a demonstration so that we would know what to do.

It immediately became clear what the second milk bottle lid was for! We had to mix up some flakes of the olive oil soap in water as hot as we could bear it, in the milk bottle. One lid was left intact, so that one could shake up the contents, or take it home without spilling it, and the second had holes pierced in it. The bottle was then used to sprinkle the hot soapy water all over the felt.

I took my camera, but until the end, forgot all about using it, as we were so engrossed, and so busy for the entire time!

The first stage was to lay out one piece of bubble wrap (bubble side up) and then to arrange overlapping pieces of wool pulled off the roving, so that all the fibres ran parallel, in the same direction. For the second layer, the fibres were laid at right angles, and then a final layer was laid down, the fibres being as in the first layer. This would give strength to the felt. We were told not to do more than three layers of fairly thinly spread wool fibres, because if it was too thick, it wouldn’t be very pleasant to wear as a scarf.

The final layer was where we could introduce some pattern, with different colours being laid down, and we were told that you could add different fibres for texture at this stage, but anything non-wool (and non-felting) would have to be trapped under a thin layer of wool to anchor it in place.

Once all the fibres were laid down, the whole thing was wetted with the hot soapy water from the milk bottle. The second layer of bubble wrap was then laid on top, bubble side down, and then the surface was wetted with more soap solution from the milk bottle, and with the bar of soap being rubbed over the surface – this made a nice slippery surface, to make the next stage easier.

Now was where the hard work began. At first, the rubbing had to be gentle, so that the pieces of fibre underneath wouldn’t shift. This is not an exact science, of course, and there is always some movement, but that’s the joy of any hand-made project! As the felting process started to take hold (after about 5 mins) one could get more vigorous, and eventually quite aggressive, until about ten minutes had elapsed.

We were then told to peel back the bubble wrap and examine the work. The “pinch test,” whereby you pinch a little from the surface of the work and see how well stuck down it is – if it lifts too much, then more rubbing is required, but if you couldn’t pull it out very far and were able to lift the piece with it, it was felting well. We were told to expect shrinkage of about a third.

The bubble wrap sandwich with the felt in between, was then transferred onto a towel, and this was rolled up with the felt in the middle like a Swiss roll. We then had to do what the teacher called “rock and roll” – rolling the Swiss roll back and forth a hundred times, then unrolling it and turning it round, and repeating the process. Depending on the result after the second time of rolling, one either advanced to the next stage or did some more rocking and rolling. When this process was complete, the Swiss roll could be unrolled and the felt taken out.

If insufficient felting and shrinking had taken place by this stage, we were told to bunch up the piece and throw it as violently as possible onto the table top to increase more shrinking. Once we were satisfied with the result, the felt had to be rinsed to get the soap out, and then we all laid out our work on the table for teacher/group critique.

Here are some photos of the work. Bear in mind that this is still wet, and the samples don’t look as good as they will when fully dry.

As you can see, there’s quite a bit of variety! The teacher said that considering that this was our first attempt, we had done very well.

I realised after I took these pictures that I didn’t include my own piece! Here it is, after it had dried.

I began it by laying down the first layer of avocado-dyed wool. The second layer was a mostly undyed wool – you can see a bit of this at the bottom where I didn’t cover it up adequately. The third layer was mostly greens and browns, and I tried to pull them out into thin strands, overlapping them and keeping them at different lengths. Finally, I laid down circles of orange and added small rolled-up pieces of brown and orange. Things do move around a bit once you start the felting process, but that’s part of the attraction of the whole thing – you never know quite what you are going to end up with!

I am surprised just how quickly the felting process takes place, and how fast one can make a small project. I had thought it would take a lot longer and a lot more effort to get the fibres to felt together but it is fast enough to be alarming if one isn’t careful – the teacher warned us to keep all supplies of dry wool well out of the way once we started, because if it accidentally got wet, especially with hot water, and was then agitated and moved, felting would take place immediately.

This was so much fun to do. I love how the fibres blend together and form quite a firm, soft fabric – there’s so much potential in this! I am looking forward to being able to make three-dimensional pieces, and adding texture to the surface, incorporating different fibres, adding embellishments (made from felt or other materials), hand and machine embroidery, and using resist to prevent two surfaces from felting together… the possibilities are endless! You can make virtually anything out of felt and I have found thousands of pictures online (Pinterest is a great source) – people even make delightful little cat beds out of it!

This morning I was very tired indeed when I woke up, probably as a result of all the physical work I did last night! I had a lie-in and rested this morning. Felting is probably not an activity I will be able to do every day but I have proved myself well able to do it, so I am feeling very encouraged. It’s another string to my bow!

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What’s On My Workdesk this Wednesday? Just about everything!! My poor ARTHaven is a tip. Again.

We have had a very busy week. Today is the last day of our holiday at home, as Mum is returning today after spending 10 days with my sister, giving my hubby and me a most welcome break. We have had several trips out, the highlight being our visit to the Kaffe Fassett exhibition at the American Museum in Bath, which is running till November, I think. (You can see all 99 photos I took, here in my Flickr album.) I am still basking in the experience of being totally immersed in a riot of colour! I have been a fan of Kaffe Fassett’s for years. If you get the chance, do go – it’s really worth seeing.

I also had a shopping day on my own – a rare event these days and I had Such Fun! I had a good old rummage in the charity shops and came home with some lovely stash for altering and upcycling – a project that will have to wait for the New Year at this rate.

Last night we had a friend round for dinner – I did a roast chicken and lots of vegetables, and my famous apple lasagne for pudding – nobody felt like any cheese after that lot! So I have been busy cooking and preparing. To celebrate this extremely rare event (Shoshi doing any entertaining!) I got out the best china and we had a candle on the table. The works. I even managed to clear everything up afterwards!

Tonight I begin my felt making classes, and I have been busy preparing for that. We have to take a certain amount of stuff with us (rolling pin, bubble wrap, Merino rovings etc. – in the photo above, you can see the green box full of all this stuff, ready to take for the class) and since the theme of the 5-week course is Autumn, I decided to dye a few pieces of Merino to go with this theme. Here is my dyeing table by the sink in my ARTHaven, with the pieces I dyed yesterday.

Last week I also dyed some Merino roving with avocado skins and pits and it came out a gorgeous dusky pink colour, and I shall be taking that too. I have got some commercially dyed rovings. I have experienced some problems with the wool tending to felt during the dyeing process so I’ve decided to card it before taking it to the class.

A few days ago my parcel of new stash arrived, and most of that is dumped on my desk. I made some moulds from some of the metal embellishments and these are now put away (about the only thing that is!!). I am hoping to have a chance in the next few days to sort out the chaos and try and tidy up a bit, so that I can get down to some work again!

Have a great creative week, everybody, and happy WOYWW.

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Hop over to Julia’s blog (click on the WOYWW link in my sidebar) to join in the fun and see how messy our work desks are this week!

You find mine just as I was starting to put things away after making the card you can see on the left, inspired by a wonderful design by Helen Allen. I’ve done a post about this where you can see how I made it step by step.

The rest of the stuff consists of bits of card used in the project, some acrylic paints and gel mediums (including the iridescent one which is simply gorgeous), a bottle of Dylusions spray ink, some Distress Inks and a jar of dirty paint water! You can also see the gorgeous little pincushion Lunch Lady Jan made for me when we did an ATC swap with WOYWW a couple of years ago – it’s not used for sewing pins, but pins for unblocking glue bottles, and generally poking holes in things. It lives on my desk close to hand at all times! You can also see my deluxe Bosch hot glue gun, and on the left, the little cream tin bath that had a teddy and some soap in it once – nowadays I use it for bunging odd bits and pieces in, and it’s useful for keeping miscellaneous gubbins in one place.

In case you are wondering where the teabags are this week, there are some stacked up on the far right at the back, underneath a piece of tea-dyed wadding fabric. The others are stashed elsewhere while I was working on the card.

Elsewhere in my ARTHaven this week, I’ve done a bit more dyeing. The first batch I did came out too dark for what I wanted it for, so I mixed up another dye bath with the same colour proportions but this time, half strength. Here is the result – the two skeins at the back are the new colour, and the ball at the front is the old – I can use this in other projects. It’s a gorgeous colour but just not right for my current knitting project, which is more subtle. This chestnut brown is made up of equal quantities of dark brown and red dye, with half the quantity of yellow. Colour mixing is Funnnn……

Now I have got my stock solutions all made up, it’s a quick and easy process to dye any small quantities I want, of any colour. It’s great having the table right by the sink and microwave.

Speaking of my knitting – I have now started decreasing down the first sleeve, so it shouldn’t be long before the number of stitches becomes appreciably fewer and the work should progress more quickly.

Last week I said I might have some exciting news for you this week. Unfortunately it has been delayed but hopefully I’ll be able to share it with you next week! Here’s hoping, anyway.

Have a great week, everybody – full of creativity and fun. Happy WOYWW!

Dyeing–Introduction

One of the essential features of my new ARTHaven when I was designing and planning it, was to have a sink with running water, and a microwave. This picture was taken before the work was finished.

I now have a table in front of the balcony door from which to work – this is moveable and can also take up residence in my ARTHaven proper if necessary. My intention is to fix a drying rack above the sink – the previous owner of the house left behind a steel saucepan rack (Ikea, I think), and once I have sawn the rails to length, I shall fix a bracket over the microwave and the rails will enable me to suspend skeins of yarn by hooks so that they can drip into the sink. In the meantime, I can use the airer in the utility room.

Many years ago I did some experiments with acid dyes and woollen yarn, but this remained very inconvenient to pursue until I had a better setup, so it all got set aside and packed away. Ever since I got established in my new ARTHaven I have wanted to revive this activity, and this has now become more urgent because I am running out of the chestnut brown yarn for my knitting project. I am now in frugal/recycling mode and if I can dye some yarn to the required shade rather than buying it, I shall be well pleased. A while back I bought a large cone of unbleached 4-ply machine knitting wool just for this purpose.

I have set out my acid dyeing equipment on the table:

I also have some Procion (reactive) dyes for use with cellulose fibres (vegetable fibres, e.g. cotton) but for the moment I am concentrating on acid dyes which work best for protein fibres such as wool.

You might ask why I am using chemical dyes rather than natural dyes which produce such gorgeous subtle colours. The answer is that chemical dyes are very much more convenient to use, and it is possible to get repeatable results, which are not possible with natural dyes. Also, the process of natural dyeing is more complicated, with the addition of different mordants (dyebath additives that enable the dyes to “bite” into the fibres and become fast) for different materials, and to produce different colours from the same materials. The dye materials have to be sourced and gathered, often in quite large quantities in order to produce sufficient colour, and the whole process is a lot more messy and takes up a lot more room. Chemical dyes are very sophisticated these days, and while the basic unmixed colours can seem very harsh, especially at full strength, with careful blending and at greater dilutions, the most beautiful and subtle shades can be created, every bit as attractive as the colours produced by natural dyes, without the hassle.

When I made my initial foray into dyeing all those years ago, I bought this excellent book which explains how the different types of dye work, and how to use them in the small, non-industrial craft-room setting. As far as I know it is no longer in print, but there are many similar books on the market.

These are the dyes I bought at the time – a good representative selection of colours. It is possible to mix the three primaries (blue, red and yellow) to produce every colour, and with black, to create deeper tones (in this selection, black is called “toner”) but the addition of a turquoise blue, brown, pink (a crimson red with a higher blue content than the basic scarlet red) and violet, it is possible to create the full range of colours more easily and with less risk of “muddiness.”

These dyes come in powder form, and are extremely concentrated. In industrial quantities, they can be accurately measured and added to bulk quantities of fibre, but in the craft room setting, where one is dealing with much smaller quantities of yarn, it becomes impossible to weigh out the small quantities (minute fractions of a gram) that are required, so it is necessary to make up stock solutions of the powder with water – the standard is a 1% solution, which is 1 part dye to 100 parts water, or 1 gram to 100 ml of water. This basic solution of known strength can then be added to the dyebath with much greater accuracy with the use of small measuring cups and syringes, the quantity being governed by the exact weight of yarn being dyed, and the depth of colour required.

Unfortunately some of my original stock solutions have dried up, and I am not sure of the concentration of the ones that have not, so I am going to have to dispose of them and start again. It is not a problem because each stock solution uses such a small quantity of the powder and I have plenty more of each colour.

The amount of water required for the dyebath is known as the liquor ratio and is commonly 20:1, i.e. 20 parts water to 1 part fibre, or 20 ml water per gram of fibre.

The most astonishing thing I discovered when playing with this before was that if you measure everything accurately, however intense the colour may be with the addition of the dye to the dyebath, after the dyeing process has completed, the dyebath ends up absolutely clear, with every molecule of colour having been taken up by the yarn! This is very impressive to witness.

To aid the colour take-up and the fastness of the dye, certain dyebath additives are required. With acid dyes, the acid is acetic acid, or vinegar. Glauber’s salt, or sodium sulphate, is a white powder which can be made up into a stock solution of 10% (100g powder to 1 litre of boiling water), and is added to the dyebath before introducing the fibre. Its purpose is to block the takeup of the dye by the fibres at the initial stage of dyeing; as the temperature is increased, this effect is reduced. This enables the dye to be taken up by the fibre in a more controlled way, resulting in a more even colour.

Here is my measuring equipment. The simple set of metric scales is very accurate; you simply slide the black bar along in the stand until the black lines line up with the weight you require on the scale, and when the correct weight of dye or fibre is placed in the white cup, the scales will balance on the stand which has a curved underside. I have several ice cream tub spoons, syringes in various sizes for measuring small quantities of liquid dye, measuring cups and glass and plastic stirrers. I also have a dairy thermometer (not pictured). With microwave dyeing, the temperature is less critical.

The great advantage of microwave dyeing is that it is easy to dye small quantities, which is probably what I shall want for most of my projects. Also, you can dye several batches at once, as they are in separate containers. The heat is very uniform and without the “hot spots” you can get on a conventional hob, which helps keep the colour uniform. The book says that there is no danger doing dyeing in a microwave primarily used for cooking, although the utensils used for dyeing should be separate. In my case, of course, the microwave in my ARTHaven is exclusively for art and craft use and is not used for food preparation anyway, and the equipment never finds its way into the kitchen.

From the beginning I decided to keep an accurate record of my experiments, and I used an A5 ring binder, and created a series of pages made from card with punched holes through which I could inset a small sample of dyed yarn, together with the recipe, and the description – e.g. Single colour, half strength (5% solution), so that all the colours could be accurately reproduced when required. This photo shows some of the darker colours, with the full-strength basic, unmixed colours on the left, and half-strength on the right.

Later on in the book are the results of a much weaker solution of dye, and some of the colours are beautifully subtle, especially when mixed.

With accurate measurement, any colour in the colour library should be easily reproducible. I never got round to finishing the book, but hope to complete the task soon, and also do some experiments with mixing from the colour wheel, which I have learnt more about since those days – for example, it is often better and more subtle to add a little of a colour’s complimentary from the opposite side of the wheel to dull the colour, rather than by adding black. There are instructions in the book for creating a colour wheel from rings of card wound with the different colours of yarn, and it would be fun to create one of these – not only is it a useful reference tool, but it is also highly decorative and beautiful.

When I was exploring the delights of dyeing all those years ago, I created this display board for a craft show I took part in, to show the small sample skeins I made at the time, attached to a cork bath mat with pins and narrow ribbon. Even though it is incomplete, it is still an attractive display! Each skein is labelled with a small tie-on label, giving the colour, intensity, proportions of mix, etc.

Watch this space for progress with my experiments. It will be very useful to be able to produce any colour I want, in the quantity I want, for any given project.

As time goes on, I am looking forward to experimenting with Procion dyes and dyeing some cotton fabric. I have some wooden printing blocks from Colouricious, and I also recently acquired some decolourant, a substance you can paint onto fabric or paper etc., or stamp with rubber stamps or wood blocks, and with the application of heat, the colour disappears. In my dye box is a selection of fabric paints which can also be block printed. Many moons ago, like my 1960s contemporaries, I dabbled with tie-dye and there’s a lot of potential with that, too. I have huge quantities of old white cotton sheets and it will be fun to transform some of this fabric into something creative and more useful. I feel the time has come to expand my mixed media work into fibre and stitch, and I am very much looking forward to getting going on the sewing machine and introducing free motion embroidery into my projects too, especially the teabag art. Combining all this with paper and card, inks and acrylics, gel mediums, metal, melted and fusible textiles, the boundaries are becoming less and less distinct and anything goes!!

Update – I’ve been dyeing all afternoon and have made up new stock solutions in all 8 colours, and after dyeing a test skein with a mixture of brown and red and a touch of yellow, have now dyed two nice skeins of a rich dark chestnut brown for my knitting! It is cooling in the dyebath and I’ll wash it later, and hang it to dry, so photos in the next couple of days, I hope. I have to report that the setup in my ARTHaven with the table by the sink and the microwave above, with light coming in through the balcony door, is absolutely ideal. I can even plug the kettle in nearby!