loveFibre

Saturday morning on the beach yielded a rusty treasure - a pole, the size of an axle, perfect for shibori wrapping. My wonderful husband lugged it home for me - though it’s not far to go, it was quite heavy! I’ve collected a few other little rusty odds and ends on our walks as well.

In the new year I’ll try some silk wrapping, but as it’s going to be outside in the salty air anyway and it’s bound to rain quite a bit I’m just leaving it covered in a strip of calico and will see what’s happened in two weeks’ time.

I had a bug last week, still recovering from it in fact, and so I got behind with work and that left very little time for making. Just a couple of small felt samples, trying to capture some of the colours of the sea and sky, and the winter machair. The top one is nuno felt - merino and silk tops on silk georgette, and the bottom one is merino - it looks the same size but is really just a scrap, much smaller - how hard it is to get a sense of scale on-screen. I actually remembered to measure shrinkage on the nuno sample, which started with a piece of silk 35 x 26 cm and is now 23 x 13cm.

I made three felted fleece samples yesterday - from Hebridean, alpaca and merino roving.

hebridean fleece felt sample

alpaca fleece felt sample

merino fleece felt sample

The Hebridean fleece is quite hairy, just a little rough and yet soft as well, while the alpaca looks hairy but feels fluffy and silky. However, I think I did something wrong felting the alpaca, maybe rubbed it too hard too soon, it’s not very well felted after a lot of work, and doesn’t look anything like other alpaca felt I’ve seen on the web. More experiments obviously needed.

I think it would be interesting to dye the Hebridean fleece, could it give a rich deep colour with a hint of brightness wherever the white fibres take up the dye?

And the merino - I didn’t really need to make a sample of that, just an excuse to play with the colours!

Today I finished off the felt slippers for Alan. He was away when I started them and I wanted to wait to do the final sizing till he could actually try them on. They turned out very hairy! I used a mixture of Hebridean, alpaca and merino, but I think the stray hairs are the white fibres from the Hebridean fleece, as they’re all pale. I did use some pale alpaca but also an equal amount of chestnut and that has all felted in fine. I’ve now done what a sensible person would have done first, and made a sample of each to see how they felt alone. Everything is drying in the airing cupboard (it’s so nice to have one of those).

I’m quite pleased with the slippers for a first attempt and glad to say Alan seems to like them too. I tried to be restrained with the colours and not put in any pink or purple! In contrast, the card I made last week has rather a lot of both.

I’ve been enjoying some ‘new to me’ blogs recently - India Flint’s Not all those who wander are lost; Elvis Robertson’s Lovely Textiles, found through Neki’s blog; and Jenny Dean’s Wild Colour, found through Helen’s blog.

We’ve had some glorious winter sunshine this week, with clear skies and beautiful sunsets. We don’t see the sun set over the sea from here, but the distant clouds catch its colours and give us a glimpse of it.

When I was working on this quilted hanging, one of my aims was to use felt as the wadding in a way that made its colour a central element of the design. I’m still thinking about that, so today I’ve been stitching some studies for my sketchbook pages for the April TIF challenge (changing a piece of fleece in as many ways as I can). I collected a pile of sheer fabrics of varying opacity and made a small sample of each, layered with some of the pink felt I’d already made.

The best silk I’ve found for this is silk organza (top right) - it’s what I used on the front of my hanging; though I think you can get silk net and I’d love to try that. The manmade fabrics at the bottom - nets, voile and organza - are the sheerest of the samples but I really prefer natural fibres (although I confess I went and bought the finer net and the organza specially for this at Reticule today!). It’s partly because I like the feel of natural fibres so much more, but also because so many manmade fibres are petrochemical based. I think if I were to use them extensively I’d look for them in secondhand clothes and recycle.

In the middle are the cottons - an organdie on the right, and on the left my favourite - cotton scrim. I just love the combination of the open weave and the distortion from the stitching and the way the felt shows through and is furrowed by the pull of the stitches.

I’m going to try a kind of nuno version on a partially felted base, and also with dyed scrim and different colours of felt.

And I just wanted to share these, because they’re so lovely…

I know you shouldn’t but sometimes it’s hard not to - this new book Eco-Colour by India Flint looks so beautiful and the subtitle is so enticing - ‘Botanical Dyes for Beautiful Textiles: Environmentally Sustainable Dyes’. I feel a moment of weakness coming on. India Flint’s web site is delicious as well - beautiful work and a sidebar that takes the phrase ‘navigation metaphor’ to new poetic heights.

It’s been a lean and hungry textile week for me, with a time-consuming project keeping me stuck at the computer, but I did sneak away long enough to make a little piece of nuno felt, on a cotton scrim base. I’m really trying to get that lovely barnacle-like effect on the cloth side - this is a bit more like the nuno felt I’ve seen than my last attempt, so progress in the right direction.

The pastel side:

… and the bright side:

I imagine a garment with the delicately coloured textural side outward and the bright soft fleecy side within.