One of the highlights yesterday was being able to complete my first felting project of the New Year thanks to the resumption of my water supply! Due to the really cold spell of weather we are in the middle of, coupled with my lack of heat, I have been wearing a pair of knitted fingerless mittens around the house a lot and been thankful for the extra warmth that they are providing. With this in mind I decided to make a simple pair in felt and post them to a friend in Slovenia as a thank you for a wonderful surprise Christmas present.
Bearing in mind that the Icelandic wool dosen’t shrink quite as much as merino appears to I used a simple rectangular resist which was just a bit wider and a little bit longer than I wanted the finished mittens to measure. I laid out two layers of fibre around the resist and then added a simple swirl in pink, blue and green yarn for decoration, unfortunately my camera hates photograping raspberry for some reason so you will just have to imagine a rich deep raspberry wool for the background. The mittens really didn’t take too long to felt, once I was sure that the fibres had entangled well and were felting together I opened the resist and cut the rectangle in two down the centre.
I continued to roll and full the mittens together and when they were almost the right size cut out the thumb hole and then fulled each one individually. This is a really nice project as an introduction to felting around a resist and I am now planning to offer it as my first felting workshop of 2010, details to follow of dates and times tomorrow!
As you can see from my dry looking hand, I need to apply some of the gorgeous natural beeswax hand cream that was a great present from Ann and Alison at our last felting session before Christmas!
They look wonderful Nicola, so glad your back on track now
with water etc. If I lived in your part of the world I would
love to take some of your fabulous sounding classes. All
the best for the year ahead. Happy Felting.
Regards
Sheila
Those are gorgeous! I am off to make them now…I am hoping some day to take a class from you…do you have a list of your summer/fall classes as yet? Many thanks! Debbe in Canada
(but I would be coming from Cornwall for the class) OR do you ever teach in England? Thanks again, Debbe