A DIVERSION

Here are the promised photos & a description of the new hobby I've taken up...

Felting was something I got interested in from prowling around on the internet when I was bored. I esp. liked the hands on aspect of felting, but I guess that's the appeal of all "handi" crafts. With felting you are involved in the process of locking natural fibers, (roving) to themselves. The malleability of the fibers and the variety of expression that can be achieved by using different materials and your own hands, I think makes felting an optimum creative experience. It's like sculpting, painting and weaving all rolled into one project.

I like to think of creativity as a conceptual force and from the efforts of our inner selves we give birth to physical manifestations. In fact from my painting days, the only painting I've kept of my own is titled "Conception" to me it represents the initial spark of creativity.
So without further ado, my latest creative efforts...I dislike sewing with needle and thread, fortunately felting scarves doesn't require any of that. Only a length of silk for the foundation of the project, roving ( in this case I'm using wool) and a medium for the dying of the material. The wool used in my first projects were all dyed by myself with kool-aid. The first being the small orange scarf on the left. As, it seemed to resemble an orange caterpillar to me, I thought it fitting to continue with the theme. The second, the more ambitious project became a cocoon scarf, here I left a lot of the silk exposed and embedded the blue dyed wool"cocoons" under a layer of natural white wool fiber. (the white bale of wool is in the background.)

I decided to document my next project for you, so you could see some of the process involved. I thought it only fitting that this project should proceed from the cocoon. I wanted to do something woolly and moth like.... In choosing my materials, I decided to incorporate the wool I had from a coarse black sheep. (the bale is in the back of the picture, the natural black wool is actually shades of brown and grey ) to contrast the finer white roving. I choose black silk for the scarfs foundation and also bought some black food coloring type dye to dye some of my white wool jet black. The wool is dyed in the crockpot in the background in small batches...


This next picture shows how I laid out one of the layers of wool that would make up part of the design. The length of silk material is laid upon this...

...and the wool roving is folded over the edges, more wool fiber is added to the top, thus encasing the silk.
Next post, I'll show you the finished felt product....