How I made a felt heart that I’ll turn into a pendant

Hi everyone, I know, it has literally been YEARS since I posted here. I’ve been living abroad on board a sailing yacht and was making weekly video content of our travels. Living on a boat made it hard to create anything from felt as I had limited space and time. However, I’m back in Australia again, and I thought I’d kick off my creativity with a nice, simple project.

Wet felting a little love heart. This can be given as a gift to your loved one, or it can be made into a pendant, a keychain, or a bag dangly… I show you how to make these in my next video.

But for now, check out this full tutorial on my YouTube channel by using this link! https://youtu.be/rMZQ5oNlhyU

When you visit my channel, you’ll see there are heaps of crafting tutorials up there already. Do let me know which one you like the best.

Happy felting, and see you soon… I’m just about to edit the next video for you guys and gals, so this post is short. (But still filled with love). Do let me know if you’d like to see more of this type of project.

Christmas felt pebbles, brooch & pic

I fancied a change today.  No scarves today, I wanted to do something different. Something cute. Something small.

Felted Christmas pebbles

Wet felted Christmas pebbles approx 5x3cm

So I collected some pebbles from the garden and felted them in Christmas colours;

red with green silk,

white with red silk,

green with red silk,

white with purple silk,

purple with white silk and a touch of sparkly gold Angelina fibre.

Yummy!!

I’ve also covered one pebble in dark blue with lighter blue silks and I think I will be embroidering a star on that one.

I think these will make lovely little stocking fillers, or Christmas table decorations.

Then I made a…

15x15cm Felt picture

This is of an evening nature scene, 15x15cm which I will stick onto a canvas of the same size.

Here are a couple of pics of the layout and the picture itself.  The first one is of the layout, mainly of merino wool, with some silk tops, a little Angelina fibre in the sky, some nepps as stars, some silk noile flowers and a little bit of silk sari for patterning in the foreground.  The photo of the layout was taken in daylight and the one of the finished painting was taken in artificial light this evening, so there’s a bit of a difference with the hues.

Layout for nature evening scene

Wet felted picture 15x15cm of evening nature scene

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Needle felted brooch – country scene

Then, with time to spare, I got out my felting needle and a large button for sizing, and felted a little nature scene with a poppy in the front, which I stuck onto the button, after I’d attached a brooch clasp to the back.  Here are a couple of photos of this.  It is very cute, and only 4cm in diameter.

I thoroughly enjoyed making these different objects and I’ll make some more smaller, and different items, which I’ll be able to display for my customers at the two pre-Christmas markets that I’ll be attending.

Felt brooch back

Brooch: Needle felted scene 4cm diameter

Two more scarves for the markets

Nov ’13 Glasshouse Market stall

Yesterday, along with the Poppy Scarf, I also made a couple more nuno felt scarves using a hand-dyed piece of chiffon that I cut into one thin and one wider strip. I was very industrious as I was working towards today’s Glasshouse Market stall, and the next few markets before Christmas.

Without going into the ins and outs of the whole production, here are some photos of the finished scarves.

Summer scarf in rose, lavender, heliotrope and yellow on hand-dyed tissue silk using lighter dye bath of same colours.

Close up of narrow summer scarf nuno felted onto tissue silk. Colours include lavender, heliotrope and rose.

Close up of summer scarf in rose, lavender, heliotrope and yellow – modelled by a lady wearing a rose top.

Slim summer scarf tied as belt

Summer scarf nuno felted onto tissue silk using merino wool on tissue silk, with silk hankies and silk tops. Hand dyed colours include lavender, heliotrope and rose.

Hemmed soft, drapable nuno felted silk scarf with poppies at either end.

Love Poppies! – Nuno felt scarf!

Poppies! Nuno felted summer scarf with tissue silk, merino wool, silk noile, silk tops, silk hankies.

One end of poppy scarf. Lots of silk hankies.

Closeup of one end of poppy scarf showing poppy field. Merino, tissue silk, silk noile, variegated yarn.

Here’s a lovely lightweight scarf I have just made.  I couldn’t leave the poppies until I had used the theme on at least one other item.

Changing my style slightly, although still keeping the scarf as fine as possible and using the wool mainly to ‘stick’ silk to silk, I laid one end of the scarf out showing a poppy field, and the other with three large poppy heads.

This will be on display over the weekend as well.

Poppies – two felt ‘paintings’

With only 2 sleeps to go to the Art Exhibition at Beerwah Community Hall, my dining area and kitchen look as if there’s been an invasion of the Arty Crafty Brigade!

Not sure that I had enough to display at the exhibition, and spotting a couple of 30x30cm deep canvases locally, then finding some lovely mottled dark grey/black quilting material, I had an idea to make a couple of poppy felt art works.  I have been inspired by stunning poppies on felt dresses by Oprisan Alina who makes beautiful vibrant and incredible works.  Rather than copy what she was doing, which I do not like to do, I took my love of the vibrancy and delicateness of poppies and translated them into my own design.

As you know if you’ve been following my blog, when I do a felt painting, I usually make the whole thing out of wool. However, as I had found the background already, I decided to make the poppies as separate items and stick them to the covered canvases.  Thankfully my handyman neighbour had an industrial staple gun so helped me with the covering.

I won’t even go into my drama on Saturday when I spent five hours felting one of the poppies with some ‘merino wool’ from Spotlight (bought on the spur of the moment in case I didn’t have enough red wool) that is apparently good for needle and wet felting.  After turning the kitchen blue with my swearing and trying all the felting tricks in the book I eventually gave in to the fact that what I was trying to felt may have looked like and felt like red wool rovings must actually be synthetic.

It was originally going to be four petals, two behind separated by a resist.  However, after the felting farce, I got my big sharp scissors and cut the back two off.  These were made solely out of the Spotlight ‘wool’, whereas the top two petals had a large quantity of my other real wool rovings that had been hand dyed in different shades of red, so they had pretty much felted how I wanted them.

Non-felting ‘merino’ wool from back two petals with finished 2-petal poppy using my wool

Leaves and petals all contain high amounts of silk tops and hankies and I liked how they turned out. The second lot of poppies had one flat and one side on flower that opened to see inside.  I sewed in some nice black beads for detail and worked on the layout.

For the buds I used a thicker felt and then fluffed out the felt with a needle to give the fuzzy effect that real buds have.  Actually it was only after researching a good poppy photo, that I discovered how many different varieties of poppy there are, all with different stamen arrangements.

I have finished sticking it all down with good quality fabric glue and have just taken some pics.  Here they are.  Now I’ve got to find some wire and get them ready to hang.

Diptyche of poppies. Wet felted with beading.

Detail of beading inside the smaller poppy.

Library Display

This is a quick post to show a couple of pics of a limited variety of my felting that is on display at Beerwah Library for two weeks.

If you aren’t in the area but would like to visit the library, the address is:

Beerwah Library, 25 Peachester Road, Beerwah Qld 4519. Phone for opening hours: 1300 542 727

It is lovely to have the opportunity to display my work locally.  I am a member of the Glasshouse Country Arts Trail and we have several weeks available to display members’ works.  Ilia Starkovsky is also displaying some of his photographic art, and Bronwyn Hill and/or Melanie Gray Augustin will also be bringing showing some of their work this fortnight.

A variety of my work in the display cabinet at Beerwah Library

Arts Trail and Library Exhibits!

Aside

I’m a bit excited and also a bit spread out in Beerwah this week!

The latest Glasshouse Country Arts Trail is on to coincide with the school holidays and I am exhibiting with fellow Arts Trail member, Sandra Price at her studio this weekend until Wednesday.

At the same time, I am displaying some of my felt at the local library for a couple of weeks in the glass cabinets at the front of the library.  I will also have my Mt. Coonowrin wall hanging displayed there, as an example of the variety of uses of wet felting.

If you aren’t in the area but would like to visit the library, the address is:

Beerwah Library, 25 Peachester Road, Beerwah Qld 4519. Phone for opening hours: 1300 542 727

I must say, it’s heart warming to have these opportunities of sharing what I love with my local community.

 

Wet felt glass vase

I was looking round a local shop the other day and found a couple of long thin glass vases which looked perfect for a felting project.

I like the tall, slender shape – 24 x 5cm – and the vase is made with glass thick enough not to break during the felting process.

This is the first attempt at covering a glass vase, so I was careful to work out the correct size for the resist, allowing for shrinkage.  After measuring the height, depth and width of the vase, adding height and depth, and width and depth, then multiplying by 1.2, gave me a resist that was 12 x 34.8cm which I rounded up to 35cm.

So, which colours to choose?

I had a vision of natural cream at the top, with a stronger colour for the base and I wanted to add a pattern.  For the pattern I chose some multicoloured yarn in oranges and green shades, and selected orange for the base colour.

Process

The first phase included laying out the yarn on the resist, as I chose to make the vase inside out.  I cut different lengths and arranged them on the resist hoping they would be so evenly spread out at the end, that it would be difficult to tell this was made on  a flat resist. I then sprinkled a few wisps of mulberry silk tops to give added interest.

I layered three layers of merino wool at right angles to each other, wetted it with soapy water, rubbed through a small piece of net curtain that I laid on top of it and when it held together fairly well, I removed the net and flipped the whole thing. First of all I turned in the overhanging tops that I had laid about 2cm over the edges.  This would create part of the invisible seam of the finished vase.

The flip side was a repeat of the first.

Turning over again, I repeated the process two more times with two more layers of rovings finely laid at right angles, but without needing to overlap these.

On the final layer I added a variegated orange/brown tops mix instead of orange so if anyone wants to peer down to the bottom of the vase, they can see ‘matching’ inside.

Rubbed, rolled, rubbed and rolled.

Cut off the top edge and removed resist.

Heated, threw, heated, mashed.

Began shaping, first over the end of a pool noodle, then as it shrank, over the actual vase.

Eventually it shrank to a size I was very happy with and fitted nice and snugly over the glass.

Rinse, second rinse in water with splash of vinegar.  Spin dry.  Reshape over vase.

Photograph.

Remove glass and hang out on the line to dry.

Finished vase

For a first at a covered vase, I am very happy with the effect.

What next?

Now I’m toying with making a similar felt covering only using blues and aquas to match a similar thread in a different colour range.

But perhaps I could stretch my creative boundaries and make a vase covering that allows more of the glass itself to show through.

More on that next time.

Updated Felt Gallery

Aside

To view a lot of my felt work in one ‘hit’, check out the Gallery – Felt which I have just updated with more recent pieces.

I love teal! Two nuno scarves

I love teal – well, I love all colours period.  But each time I make a new scarf using a different colour spectrum, I fall in love all over again!

I was explaining this to my hubby as I showed him the two scarves.  I was almost salivating with delight at the colours and how the two designs had turned out.  He just looked at them, looked up at me over his spectacles and said:

“It must be a girl thing.”

I was so delighted with the shining jadey-turquoisey colours that I totally ignored the potential sexist argument thing, thinking – there must be millions of people, male and female, around the world who would feel the same over two new colourful creations. Some men love colours and creating – some women can’t bear arty farty stuff. 

You can’t generalise, which is what Baz tends to do. So I brought him back to a more personalised perception of the whole thing.

“No.  It’s a me thing.”

But that’s what makes the world go around isn’t it – the differences as well as the similarities!

So, here are pics of the two teal scarves.  I made them on tissue silk, with merino rovings, lots of silk tops and a dimensional yarn.

The zigzag one may remind you of a white one I made recently, with the teal highlights and pattern.  This one is a commission for a jeweller who has a stand at the markets I attend – Glasshouse Market – we have traded our wares with each other: a scarf from me for a bracelet from her.

I love bartering.

Two teal nuno felt scarves

Close up of teal nuno felt scarves.