A new felting book & another attempt at wet felting!

My mom and my sister were here this weekend and my mom bought me this book….she’s nice like that!  I have tons of wool and felting books, but didn’t have this one!

It is full of such great projects…even though the cover says it is for kids, I can see a purse made like this…and I am thinking one of my great nieces or nephew would like one of these horses. 

Plus this book showed a different way to wet felt, which I have never had much luck with.  I have tried to felt bars of soap, tried to make wool fabric, just never quite turns out right!  I do have this ginormous (probably this is less than half of the stash) quantity of wool roving from sheep and llama and alpaca. 

I got my stuff together…I used dish soap, an empty dish soap container for sprinkling water onto the dry wool roving, a container of water, two large towels—one on the floor under the table and one under the bubble wrap, and yes, bubble wrap. 

I laid my roving down on top of a piece of bubble wrap which was 24 x 24 inches (I taped two pieces together) with the first layer horizontal and the second layer vertical and then another layer horizontal.  I used three thick layers for the blues, pulling the roving apart as I laid it down.

Next I sprinkled the dish soap on the dry roving…

and then squirted water onto the roving.

I patted the roving down until it started to stick to itself and then I laid another piece of bubble wrap on top of the roving.

Then you roll it up like a jelly roll and start kneading and rolling it…I had to squeeze the water out of mine because I might have had had about a gallon too much on the roving!

This is the finished product…definitely a success…the colors are so deep and vibrant.   And the roving I laid on top adds a lot of texture.

Ok, so that was a success…but this one was not.  I was hoping to make some leaves out of it, with nice fall colors. 

I made this one too thin I guess, my roving was thinner and I didn’t use as much of it.   I had a lot of trouble getting it to felt (might have just been the kind of roving I used) and I tried to repair some holes which left giant hunks of roving hanging out.

So one success and one not so much…

This piece is made from llama roving.   Lovely soft brown color.  I added some swirly designs on top in a cream color.  

It was pretty coarse wool, so it kept getting thicker and thicker.  I decided I had had enough of hand felting it and it was already felted so I threw it in the washer to finish the job.  Take my word, resist this temptation if you try this!  It is close to an inch thick in spots and one half of it attached itself to the other half, so I had to cut it apart with a knife to show the design. Not so sure it will make the purse I had hoped!

You can see how coarse the wool is here.  Looks more like the darn llama itself!  The jury is still out on whether or not this one is a fail!

This project I know is a success!!  I felted a bar of soap.  I have never been able to do that before and I have tried it a dozen different times.   I used a blue/green and wrapped a length of sea foam green around the middle after it was half felted.  

I am linking to these great parties! 

Ellen