One of the brilliant knock on effects of nominating inspirational blogging friends for an award is that you get to check out all the blogs that they in turn recommend! Although I have not had time yet to check out all these new recommendations a blog that I have visited and would love to mention is Magic Felt. This is one of the blogs that Jane Bo passed the award on to and although it is written in Russian (not one of my best languages!) the images speak for themselves, fantastically inspirational. They demonstrate clearly that felt and art are universal languages, you don’t need to understand a word of Russian to really appreciate the skill and artistry in Susan’s beautiful creations. Thanks to my friend Cathywho helped me set up Google Reader, now I can monitor all the blogs that I follow every day from one simple home page.
On the felting side of things I started another rug yesterday morning using the Osman technique. This time I used one of the rug bases that I had brought back from Germany, it was made with a coarser wool than the recent ones and as a result seems to felt up into a thicker end product. I laid out a simple and colourful design perfectly suitable for a little girl’s room or even the boudoir of a not so little girl! A stylised bird in the middle, a large heart in one corner and circles and dots of brightly coloured wool over the rest of the base. I used a pinky red for the border and added gorgeous orange silk to highlight the bird, heart and the border. The bird and heart are worked in bright orange, pink, purple and red which I have laid in such a way as to blend together, not clash! I did have one major problem when I completed my first hours rolling; because of the way that I rolled the rug up in a bamboo blind the border which was closest to the centre of the package did not felt into the base, instead the wool felted to itself and formed a rope that was completly seperate to the rest of the rug. With hindsight I should have used the large plastic mat that Mehmet gave me from Turkey but I just did not have the space here at my house, the studio is totally snowed under with messiness again, really I need to get a grip on it! In fact Mehmet and I will be going into business importing these mats into Ireland and I am really looking forward to getting ones designed specifically for individual use, large enough for one person to lay out a decent sized rug on but easy enough to work by yourself. Anyway, I had to cut off the ‘rope’, lay the border again and then use the electric sander to try and combine the new fibres with the already shrunk base, a bit of work involved but all in all it worked pretty well. Another couple of hours rolling, 2 goes in the washing machine, more hours rolling last night and about 40 minutes rolling this morning, a gorgeous rug is now awaiting shaving and just begging for a little girl to love it! As soon as my camera charges up I will take some images and post them here and on Flickr.
We wet the layers of wool out (all the bags were worked between 2 layers of bubble wrap) with warm water and olive oil soap, massaged the fibres, flipped the whole thing over and then laid out the other side. In order for everyone to have a well finished bag I kept a close eye on how the members were laying to wool out, some used 3 layers before laying out any final decoration, some 4 layers. I had brought a goodie bag with a selection of different coloured wool for the final layer and also some great mulberry silk which some people choose to incorporate into their design. We broke for lunch at this stage and returned in the afternoon to roll, throw and complete the fulling process. Once the packages had shrunk enough and the members could feel the resist culing inside the felt it was time to cut open the package and decide where to place the handles. Some members cut out a semi-circle of felt as I had done in my demo bags, Mari and Mary actually didn’t cut a whole piece of felt out but created clever little flaps to use as closures in the finished bags. Once the bags were felted fully I showed everyone how to make a simple cord handle and a couple of people went on to decorate their bags with great felt flowers as well!
Nicola Brown Fine Art Textiles 