Summer is here!

We continue another crafty get-together with felting and welcome another new member Cecilia who is one of the founders of the Chile Makers.  We were in the garden for this workshop on a beautiful sunny day, perfect for sloshing around lots of water. And hard to believe that the summer is here? Let's see if the sun sticks around. 

The pictures above shows Pepa's fleece before it is felted, we use the white fleece as a base. And below sort of half way through the process, we are fixing on some of the yellow dots. These little details can move around when you are rolling it in the bamboo and bubble wrap, but you can always needle felt in fine details afterwards. 

Some more beautiful felted beads...quite a production we have here.

And here is the whole process in situ. I'm doing some carding with those strange wooden things that I am holding.  

Wet felting - an introduction

We combined needle and wet felting today and started making felt beads or balls which ever way you want to call them! Lots of elbow greece needed to felt a piece of sheep fleece into a nice round shape. Soap and hot water too of course.

You can felt a piece of fleece into a ball without needle felting, but for a nice even shape with no lumpy bits we needle felted them first into rough ball shapes before plunging them into hot water.

We welcomed Varignia to the group of makers - she is a very talented crafter herself and uses recycled materials in her own creations. 

Ah...another member of the group, Simon, all tangled up...

And the transformation of all those felted balls into a stunning necklace. This is Clare's masterpiece.  

More needle felting

We had some different members come along today to have a try at needle felting, so we continued the 2-D work with those fantastic vibrant colors of fleece. But we also branched into 3-D territory, what needle felting is all about really...

This was the start of a sheep that I was working on. Pepa made a much better one!

Many ouches along our way, the only dangerous thing about needle felting, ah well...

Crafty Things Begins!

This is our first official crafty gathering. Hurray! We did start a couple of weeks back with some crochet, but sadly there was no photographic evidence. Today we were needle felting, making some 2-D work. The felt (or fleece) that we were using comes in amazingly vibrant colors...we are all drawn towards different ones. We were needle felting onto pieces of felt that you can pick up in haberdasheries.  

You can also needle felt any kind of wool onto the same piece, it doesn't have to be all fleece. All of our designs turned out very differently.