Infusions Mini-Album–Various Textures

A fun session this evening playing with different textures on my sample pieces.

Getting stuff out to start – a couple of textured gel mediums, gesso and Polyfilla, some palette knives and my little glue applicator, and some blank sample cards.

To begin with I selected two Infusions from set 2, Violetta and Frankly Scarlet. Here they are sitting on their original sample pieces.

I spread a thick layer of gesso onto one of the sample cards with a palette knife, and then used my glue applicator to create vertical bands all or part way down.

I added the two colours of Infusions.

Some time later, the sample looked like this.

The Infusions have spread a little, but not much. I want to add something further to this sample once it is dry. The gesso should have fixed the Infusions so they won’t reactivate when I add more water.

The second sample was spread with Polyfilla after I’d spritzed the card lightly with water to help the Polyfilla to stick. I had to add some more water because it wasn’t spreading well – possibly because the Polyfilla at the top of the pot was rather dry. Once I was satisfied I’d got a nice layer on the card, I dried it slightly with the heat gun until a skin had formed on the surface, and then took my home-made bubble wrap stamp and spritzed it with water to prevent it sticking, and lightly pressed it into the Polyfilla.

This time I used Lemoncello and Black Knight Infusions from Set 1. This is what it looked like immediately after applying the Infusions.

I spritzed it fairly heavily with water and waited for it to spread and mature.

For the next sample, I got out a few of my texture makers – a crochet doiley, some fruit net and a piece of metal mesh.

Again I spread Polyfilla on the card and dried it slightly. I then pressed the texture makers into the surface – the doiley top right, the mesh at the bottom, and somewhat disappointingly, the fruit net top left – it didn’t produce as much texture as I’d hoped.

Time for the Infusions – this time Royal Blood from set 1. I used plenty of water, to encourage the Infusions to flow into the texture. The metal mesh is well defined, and the doiley slightly less so. I blotted off the circles formed by the doiley and used a brush to paint some more infusions into the surrounding texture of the doiley to try and emphasise it a bit better.

Here’s a detail shot.

For the next couple of samples, I applied different materials to the surface, using regular matte gel medium, to create interesting textures.

The first one used bleached mulberry bark. I’ve got quite a bit of this, which I bought from a craft show a few years ago.

Here it is being applied to the card.

I used Orange County from set 1 for this one, spritzing it well with water. I love how the gel medium has acted as a resist.

Here’s a detail shot.

For the next sample, I used Violetta Infusions from set 2, after applying a piece of fruit net to the surface of the card with regular matte gel medium.

Once this sample is dry, I shall trim off the excess net. Again, I am pleased with how the gel medium acted as a resist in places.

The next sample used coarse pumice gel medium – I love this stuff – really gritty! For this one I used The Sage Infusion from set 1.

Again, a great resist effect, and I love how the Infusions have spread at the bottom of the sample, reminding me of a receding wave on the seashore. Here’s a detail shot. Once it is dry, it probably won’t look so white.

For my final sample tonight, I used Slime from set 2, and glass bead gel medium, another favourite textured medium of mine. This one has come out really well.

A detail shot. If you look carefully you can see the glass beads which look a bit like tapioca! I shall be very interested to see what this one looks like when it’s dry, as the gel dries crystal clear.

Finally, all the samples I made this evening.

Very much a work in progress. Some of the pieces need further work once they are dry. It will be interesting to see what they look like after drying overnight.

Honey Soap

Now that I’ve got most of my soap making supplies, I decided to make some honey soap this afternoon. I have a friend in London who keeps bees, and I thought she might appreciate some of this. Our soap-making teacher lent me a large mould with a honeycomb pattern with bees, which I was keen to try. I would have preferred it to have been a small mould because it held a lot of soap base and if things were to go wrong, it would be a waste, but there was no way to make a smaller amount, so I grasped the nettle and went ahead anyway! I weighed the mould filled with water to determine approximately how many grammes of soap base I would need, and discovered that there was enough in the 500g pack of honey soap base to make the large mould-full, plus two normal-sized square ones.

The honey base that I bought is a clear soap base, unfortunately not SLS free, which I’d have preferred, but I couldn’t find any online. Most commercial soaps have this chemical in them, and as long as the person using it doesn’t have an unusually sensitive skin, it should be fine. The base contained 3% honey, with no fragrance, so I bought a bottle of honey fragrance oil to add to this soap. I will generally not be using fragrance oils as I prefer essential oils whose flavour is completely natural and not a chemical approximation, but of course there isn’t an essential oil available from honey.

Here is the equipment I used to make the soap.

Back row: two plastic measuring jugs; bottles of liquid colour; spray bottle containing rubbing alcohol; large clear honeycomb mould; chopstick for stirring and paintbrush; small plastic container for mixing colour. Front row: 4-cavity soap mould made of silicone rubber; small square of bubble wrap; honey soap base; digital weighing scales.

My first task was to try and mix up some brown colour from the available colours I have – I ended up combining blue and orange (which came out green, not brown), to which I added yellow, red and black in various amounts until it looked brown enough – it would have been a lot easier if I had purple to start with but it came out OK in the end. I painted this colour neat into the depressions in the mould in the shape of the bees; of course, the clear plastic resisted the liquid and it ended up in blobs, but I thought it might be interesting to see if it would colour the soap base in a random sort of way, so I persevered with this.

The soap base melted ready for the bees. This was a small quantity of opaque white base, coloured with a small amount of the brown. This looked more or less OK to start with, but then in the mould it looked distinctly pink – pink bees??

I decided to use a plastic pipette to squirt the melted soap base into the bee-shaped depressions. This was successful at the beginning, but the pipette eventually melted and the end closed over, and was ruined, so I used another one, which held out to the end, and then also had to be chucked out. These cost pennies, so no great loss. Also, the soap base kept cooling and starting to set, so I kept putting it back for a few seconds in the microwave, until horror of horrors, I melted the jug!!! Never mind, I have 3 more (all cheapo jugs from the market so nothing too disastrous!) Possibly for things like this, where the process of pouring takes longer than usual because it’s so fiddly, it would be better to have the soap base melting in a double boiler, which would keep it liquid, rather than having to re-heat all the time.

The brown colour did mix in a random sort of way with the pale brown (pink) soap base and reminded me somewhat of those seashell-shaped Belgian chocolates! It all got pretty bubbly which isn’t very good, but I tried to disperse the bubbles as much as possible by spritzing with rubbing alcohol.

I was thinking I was going to have to wait a long time for them to set, but being so small, they set really quickly. What you are supposed to do is score the surface and spritz it with rubbing alcohol, and of course I forgot to do this, but as the surface of the bees was a bit bubbly and rough, I hoped that this would be sufficient to form a key between the two layers of soap.

Time to pour the honey soap base.

After melting this, I coloured it with a mixture of yellow, a little orange and a few drops of the brown mix, and added some honey fragrance oil, and then poured it gently from one corner where there wasn’t a bee. I left it to set, hoping it would pop out of the mould OK, without all the bees detaching themselves and flying away!

Through the golden colour of the clear soap, the bees look quite a nice colour, but the side in contact with the mould (which would be the top surface of the soap once it was turned out) would not have the benefit of this and would unfortunately be pink!!

Time to make the two normal sized soaps.

I cut a small square of bubble wrap and placed it in the bottom of the mould, with the bubbles upwards, as I’d seen done somewhere online.

I poured in half of the remaining honey soap base with its colour and fragrance. All seemed to be well and I started to clean up the jugs and stirrer etc. when I looked around, I saw that the piece of bubble wrap had floated to the surface. Grrrr. I quickly whipped it out and turned it over so that the bubbles faced into the soap, and left it to set.  I couldn’t get it to lie absolutely flat, possibly because it was slightly too large. The remaining soap base was left in the jug, to be reheated to make the second square soap.

Time to turn out the soaps. This is the large one.

The pink bees don’t look too bad! There’s nice contrast between them and the honeycomb background, anyway. I like the fact that the bees are not all the same – some have their wings spread more than others, which gives it a more natural appearance.

As you can see, along one edge, some of the bees didn’t come out, but remained stuck in the mould. This was probably because I forgot to prepare them before pouring the honey soap base. I have tried to get them out of the mould, without success – if I could get them out, I could stick them back on with some melted soap base. As it is, this edge was to be cut off, and then the rest cut into smaller, useable soaps.

The trouble with clear plastic moulds is that they are much less flexible than silicone ones. I managed to pull the sides away from the soap, and press down on the middle, but the edges were more difficult, and it didn’t want to pop out easily. Some silicone soap moulds are very flexible and you can turn them inside out to pop the soap out, which is a lot easier.

Here are the two smaller soaps I made. You can see the impression of the bubble wrap on the bottom, giving the impression of honeycomb.

The underside of the soaps, showing the impression of the bubble wrap.

Cutting the large soap. You can see the three small soaps on the right, which I cut off the side where the bees did not come out of the mould.

The soaps, wrapped. I have put the bee soaps in pairs, and each soap is individually wrapped in cellophane.

I also wrapped the small reject soaps, because I shall use these myself, and the wrappers protect them until they are used.

I am pleased with the colour and scent of this soap. I am not sure if I shall make honey soap again, though, because my preference is for making more natural soaps.

Third Felt-Making Class, and News about Beatrice

Last night we made flowers in the felt-making class. I had had a pretty stressful day (OK, not that stressful by normal standards, but with my M.E. I don’t cope too well with things going wrong) and I seemed to spend the whole day wading through treacle, with everything going just a bit wrong, and feeling very frustrated that all my energy seems to be used for boring things that have to be done, and then there’s none left for Art. The final straw was Tesco phoning to say they would be late with my grocery delivery and they arrived five minutes after we should have left for the class, and I had to make everything kitty-proof in the kitchen, and ram all the chilled stuff willy-nilly into the fridge till I got back and could sort it all out…

As a result of all this, I wasn’t on top of things in the foggy brain dept. and completely forgot to take any photos of the process of felt-making until it was all done! So the pictures that follow are all of the finished pieces at the end of the class, and then my pieces at home. I am sorry that the following description of what we did will therefore not be illustrated.

Our teacher began the class by displaying a collection of her own pieces – various different flowers, and a little bag with a flower embellishment. She explained the principle, and then gave us a demonstration, and then we all went off to make our own.

She started us off with a two-layer flower but some people were more ambitious and went to three layers. In order to prevent the layers from felting together, you have to put some bubble wrap in between. The sandwich we built up (for a two-layer flower) were therefore: a piece of bubble wrap with bubbles facing up, laid on a towel to prevent too much movement, then the wool fibres for the first layer. On top of this was a piece of bubble wrap with a hole cut in the centre, with bubbles facing down, then the wool fibres for the second layer. The sandwich was topped off with a piece of bubble wrap, bubbles facing down, with no hole cut.

For the first layer, we first laid down some green fibres to form several leaves, in a basic star-shaped formation, being careful not to make it too thick in the middle. Over this was laid a circle of the chosen colour for our flower, again, making sure it wasn’t too thick in the middle. The fibres were laid down in opposite directions as we had been taught in previous classes, and also in a circular formation. I chose orange for my poppy, with a final layer of some streaks of red radiating outwards to form some shading.

Each layer of bubble wrap was sprinkled with hot soapy water to aid the felting process, as was each layer of wool fibre.

The bubble wrap with the hole was laid on top of this first layer, and then the second layer of fibre was laid down, repeating the process for the first layer, and this time making the circle slightly smaller, so that on the finished piece, the bottom layer would extend slightly beyond the top layer.

The final touch was to pull out a small length of wool roving so that it was long and thin, and twist it between our fingers and form it into a circle, which was laid into the centre of the flower – our teacher had done this with green, but I did mine in black as this seemed more realistic for a poppy. Again, one had to be careful not to make this too thick. (I had also laid down a few fine strands of black radiating outwards from the centre.)

If one wanted to make a three (or more) layered flower, another piece of bubble wrap with a hole cut in the centre would be added after layer two, and always a solid piece to go on the top.

The idea of the separating layers of bubble wrap was to act as a resist, preventing the fibres from felting together between the layers. Where the hole was cut, the fibres would felt, thus joining the layers in the centre and leaving the outer part free.

The whole thing was likely to move around quite a bit, so we had to start off very gently, working mostly on the centre to start with, to anchor everything. After our previous classes, this was a pretty gentle felting exercise altogether, with only the rubbing stage, and no “rocking and rolling.” After a while, we started to rub the outer part, and when it was starting to felt, the whole thing was flipped over and the back was rubbed.

When it was partially felted, we lifted up the bubble wrap and cut slits with scissors to create the divisions between the petals. I made sure that the slits in the bottom layer did not line up with those in the top layer. The felting process was then continued, and every now and then, the slits checked, to make sure they had not felted together. I found when it was partially felted that the layers had shifted somewhat, but at that stage I was able to manipulate it a bit, and pull the centre back into the middle.

Eventually, sufficient felting took place to enable us to pull away the bubble wrap with the hole, and the piece was then rinsed, and screwed up and rolled around between our hands to finalise the felting process.

The whole process took only about 20 minutes, so we were able to make a second flower – one or two people even made three! I decided to make another one the same, but slightly smaller, and when I came to the rinsing and rubbing between my hands stage, I got a bit over-zealous and it felted a bit more than I’d hoped, but I pulled it back into shape and it was fine, albeit a bit thick.

When I’d finished my second flower, there was still time to spare, but not quite enough for another flower, so I decided to make a leaf, using the paler green for the basic shape, pulling it out to create indentations, and then I added some fine pieces of darker green to form the veins. Everybody loved it!

Now for some pictures of the completed work of the class. In the first one, the teacher is going through them one by one and talking about them with the person who made them. Mine are at the bottom of the picture.

Here are all the pieces, arranged in a beautiful garland!

Taken from a lower angle, showing the multiple layers. The one on the far right was tied up so that the petals would dry in a more upright position. My little selection is at bottom left.

As usual, we were instructed to rinse the pieces out when we got home, with some vinegar in the water, to neutralise the alkali of the soap and to prevent rotting.

Here are my pieces drying. I have folded the leaf in half and secured it with a plastic clip in the hope that it will dry with a bit of dimension to it.

The pieces are almost dry now. Here is the leaf:

The large poppy:

The small poppy:

This is a little bit mis-shapen on one side, but this doesn’t matter because they will eventually be sewn together as a group.

The next picture shows the backs of the pieces. You can see the leaf shapes which are felted to the backs of the bottom layer. In future, I think I may separate these leaves from the base of the flower with another piece of bubble wrap, but as they will be mounted on something and it won’t show, it doesn’t really matter.

The final photo shows the possible arrangement of the pieces for the finished group. I think I may attach this to a wire hair-band or hair clip – I have a collection of blanks for embellishment in my stash.

We were talking at the class about what we might do with them, and people were suggesting embellishing bags, making brooches, etc. I could make wheelchair ornaments from them!! They could be used to embellish cards or mixed media pieces. So many possibilities!

I am very pleased with my efforts from this class. Making flowers is a lot less strenuous than other types of felt, and they can be made up surprisingly quickly. They would make lovely gifts, and being lightweight and non-breakable, would be easy to post, too.

The observant ones among those of you who follow my blog, will notice that the background I have used to photograph my pieces is my unfinished green masterboard. It looks so pretty that I may leave it as it is!

After all my busy-ness of yesterday, today I am suffering from classic M.E. post-exertional malaise, and I have felt like nothing on earth. I was very sluggish this morning and found it hard to get out of bed, and have spent the day on the recliner, sleeping for most of the afternoon, and blog hopping in between!

News about Beatrice

Our older cat Beatrice (now 14) has had a lot of trouble with urinary tract infections recently, and after the latest course of antibiotics failed to deal with the problem, today she spent the day at the vet’s. She had a general anaesthetic so they could do a scan of her bladder, and they passed a catheter to get a decent urine sample. After each course of antibiotics we have to get a sample from her which is not very easy! The vets have devised a clever way to get samples from cats. You put down a litter tray containing non-absorbent plastic granules, and they are supposed to pee in this. You can then easily draw up some urine with a pipette and put it in the sample bottle. However… Beatrice has never been one to oblige and do the right thing, and holds out for hours and hours and flatly refuses to pee in the tray! We have to shut her in the bathroom to keep her separate from Phoebe (we don’t want her pee getting analysed by mistake!) and once, my hubby put a bed in there for her, but she peed on that. On another occasion she peed on the bathmat. Following this, she has been shut in with absolutely no home comforts at all, apart from her food, and she spends the time sitting on the edge of the bath! We can peep through the engraved glass door and see what she’s up to. Eventually she will pee, usually in the corner of the room. My poor hubby scoops up a miserable little sample, and this time, the vet said it was so contaminated with dust and grit and such, that he couldn’t really examine it under the microscope! This last time, she was in there for two whole days without going, which was freaking my hubby out until I looked it up on the Internet and found that cats can easily go 48-hrs plus without going! It seems to be a battle of wills with Beatrice…

Anyway, everything went OK today and she has no stones or crystals, and no growths in her bladder, and so far her kidneys seem to be OK (kidney problems are very common in older cats). Her sample has been sent off for analysis, and they will know after this what sort of antibiotics she should be on. When my hubby phoned this p.m. for a progress report, he was told that she was OK, but still asleep, wrapped in a blanket with a hot water bottle to keep her warm! He picked her up at about tea time and she seems fine. The vet told my hubby that Beatrice is their favourite cat! (I said that I wondered if he said that to everyone lol!) She is such a good girl at the vet’s, and doesn’t bite or scratch, and she’s such a little character that everyone loves her.

Remember this photo, taken after she had the lump removed from her neck?

Such a little dink in her premature baby-grow, the only thing small enough, which she had to wear to stop her scratching herself!

Second Felt Making Class

Last night was week 2 of the felt class, and this time we were taught how to make a picture in felt. I went with the idea of creating a mountain and lake scene with a sunset, but as it turned out (time mostly) I ended up just depicting a sunset over water. I had originally planned to frame it with trees either side, and my finished piece is wide enough to accommodate this if I choose to add some needle-felted trees later on. I asked whether it was possible to add more wet felting after the piece had dried, but our teacher told me it was not, because the new felt would shrink, and draw up the old felt which was already shrunk. Common sense really!

During the class, I did manage to take some photographs of the work in progress, but a couple of times I forgot (so caught up with what I was doing!) so there’s a bit of a gap in the photographic record. During the initial rubbing stage, when the wet material is between the pieces of bubble wrap (the most strenuous stage) my arms did give out a bit, and our lovely teacher, bless her, offered to rub my felt for me for a while so I could have a rest! If I was doing this at home, I would be able to go off and leave it for a while, but of course at the class, we have only two hours so we have to get on if we are going to complete the piece.

Before the class began, the teacher showed us the Youtube video I’d sent her the link for – I found this the other day and was highly amused and thought we’d really got off pretty lightly considering! After all, we weren’t expected to round up our sheep and shear them, and neither were we expected to bring a horse along to the class! Lol! Watch this and see!

She also warned us about buying wool rovings from dubious sources and said that she had had some recently that were full of moths! Not at all nice, and not at all what you want to bring into your house!

Anyway, to work… I was really hacked off with myself because my lovely parcel of dyed Merino rovings arrived in the post today, in time for the class, and I left them at home!! Duh… Anyway, I had enough to be going on with. (I decided to buy some ready-dyed stuff because it’s a lot of work to dye my own, and I was having problems with it felting in the dye bath.)

Here is my first layer of fibres being laid out on the bubble wrap. I decided to use undyed rovings for this, as last time I used up all the avocado-dyed stuff I’d done, just for the back of my piece!

You can see that, as instructed, I am laying the pieces down in a horizontal direction first, and overlapping them slightly.

Here is the second layer complete, this time laid in a vertical direction.

The third layer is the picture layer, with the pieces being laid predominantly in the horizontal direction again, but with the opportunity to lay small amounts in different directions to create the picture. Unfortunately I forgot to photograph this before I’d wet it, but here it is at the next stage, ready for felting.

You can see that I have created a sky which is very dark blue at the edges, and gradually lightening into the centre where the sunset is. It was amazing, blending the colours, and being able to lay down very small amounts – it was almost like painting with the fibres. I continued the sun colours down into the water (which was also blue, but with the addition of a small amount of green), adding some vertical fibres to create the illusion of a reflection. Small amounts of white were added to emphasise the sun, the horizon, some whispy clouds, and a suggestion of ripples on the water.

The next picture shows the top layer of bubble wrap laid on top of the wet fibres. The underside of the bubble wrap was wet with the hot soapy water, and more of this was added to the top surface.

The rubbing has to be done very gently to start with, or the fibres will move about and spoil the picture. As the fibres begin to felt, one can get ever more vigorous with it, and it was at this stage that my poor arms started to suffer! It is probably easier if one can stand up and have more downward pressure, but it was very hard work from a seated position. Teacher to the rescue!

The felt after the rubbing state, and ready for rolling. You can see how it is all coming together.

The piece was squeezed out to remove some of the water, and thrown down a few times onto the table to aid the shrinking process, and then the felt on the bubble wrap was put onto the towel, the top layer of bubble wrap replaced, and the whole thing was rolled up around  a rolling pin, and the forward and backward rock-and-roll movement began – 100 times in one direction, and then the felt turned through 90 degrees and then a further 100 times in the other direction. This was another stage I forgot to photograph!

Now for the photos of all our finished work, laid out on the table together. Our teacher is so encouraging, and said how thrilled she was with our work, and had not seen nicer pictures, even in a book! Although many people said they wanted to embellish their pieces further, she said that in many cases, they could stand as they were, and needed no further work.

Because we had a bit more time this evening, she asked each person to speak a bit about their work – what the inspiration was, how we felt about it, and what, if anything, we would have done differently or wanted to add later on. Some very interesting things came out.

The grey and brown one in the foreground was inspired by the design of the settee in a Gustav Klimt painting. The lady who made it said that she was disappointed how blue the grey wool turned out to be, but this was an illusion caused by the proximity of the brown – an interesting effect. We were all intrigued by the tassel-like pieces extending beyond the edge of the felt – she was worried about them not being sufficiently attached, but our teacher said they could be secured with some needle-felting.

The piece beyond was full of colour with the flowers beautifully depicted. She had added some brightly-coloured dyed wool nepps – little knobs of compacted fibre – to imitate small flowers, which was very effective.

The piece just above the Klimt one depicts the sea with a sea wall, and there are going to be some felted beach huts added, which will be a lovely pop of colour. I love how she’s depicted the waves.

The picture above shows a wonderfully vibrant piece – those gorgeous brightly coloured flowers are beautifully set off against the very dark background. She said it was inspired by the work of artist Yvonne Coomber, who now lives locally. I have seen some of her work in the past and the colours and shapes remind me of Kaffe Fassett’s designs.

Others had introduced some bling into their work, in the form of sequins etc. – easy to use if they are anchored down with a thin layer of wool fibre over the top. People also added texture in the form of nepps, and curly fleece – again, taking extra care so that they are anchored securely with a fine layer of fibre over the top.

Here is my finished piece after rinsing and drying. A Sunset Over Water.

Altogether a very interesting and productive evening. We are being well taught; there are group times and lots of individual attention. Having a relatively small number in the class really helps, but there are enough of us to provide plenty of interest as we share our different inspirations and expressions in our pieces.

WOYWW-ers – Please scroll down to see my WOYWW post.