Are you exhausted from reading these posts yet? I think yesterday’s post, which clocked in at 1700+ words, was my longest yet! It has been a busy week month, and I am so glad September is here. I’m looking for a tiny bit of a break!
On Wednesday, Liz woke up and opted to not go back into NYC, the original plan was to head to the Brooklyn museum to see the permanent installation of the Judy Chicago “Dinner Party”. Liz and I are the same age, and remember well the impact on the art world when the Dinner Party first debuted in San Francisco in 1979. It was permanently installed in 2007 at the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum in a space that is befitting, and reverential to this iconic piece of women’s history. But we opted not to do that on Wednesday.
So, Liz showed me her vast stash of teaching samples, and I was instantly inspired. Liz wrote the book on Nuno Felting, available through Amazon (she promised to send me an autographed copy of the book from the UK), and her sample collection was huge! I could have spent the whole day just taking notes. The upshot is I started to look at my fabric stash in a different way. “Could this be felted, could that be felted, what can I do with this fabric?”
Poor Liz, I must have asked her 20 times, while she was puttering in her room, “How about this?” Well, the only way to really know is to try, even I know that! So we decided to spend the day just playing with felt. The weather was glorious, so we dug through everything in my studio that could possibly be felted, all the bins of wool fibers, and the fabrics that were thin enough for the wool fibers to penetrate, and we made a total mess. No matter, I could clean that up after Liz flew back to the UK.
Some of the wool I had purchased when I was in the Pendleton outlet store last May in Portland, when I flew to Seattle to hang with my fiber buddy Robyn Spady. Some of the fabrics I pulled out had been purchased at one of the stores we hit as well, Nancy’s Sewing Basket, in Seattle. I feel like this is one big circle of fiber…
I had actually pulled out some of the wool I had been dyeing in the crock pot all spring, and on Monday while Liz was playing in the garment district in Manhattan, I did a small sample of felt, just to see how well I could do, I am really a novice felter. The one thing I’ve learned (well I learned a lot of things actually,) but the one thing I learned that was most appropriate to what I actually do, which is make clothing, is that the felt should be thin and pliable, but very well felted. So I used only two layers of wool, but felted them more than 50%. I got a sample that was beautiful and flexible and well suited to cloth for clothing.
So we hauled everything outside…
We set up our space, under one of the covered gazebos in my yard, brought hot water, olive oil soap, leftover from my felting experience last year with Loretta Phipps who flew to my studio to work with me on the Challenge piece for Convergence. Am I prepared or what?! I had a couple of large plastic trays, which did well to contain the soapy water during the felting process. Liz worked on floral brooches, starting with a cone of wool and a resist, and stupid me forgot to take pictures of what she was actually doing. When my husband wandered down to offer to make us burgers for lunch, we took the opportunity to grab him for a couple of photos, since we were all wet! My daughter wandered down as well, and soon grabbed a pan and started to play herself.
We took a quick break for lunch, and dove right back into the felting. I made a number of samples, trying all different things in my studio, including the dyed silk from the hankies I bought in Michigan at the conference there last month (was it only last month?) We arranged things on the deck railing to dry, Liz put her things on the lawn to dry in the sun, since she didn’t want to pack her samples wet for the flight home that night to the UK.
My daughter played with using a river stone as a resist, and wrapped the wool around it. I had learned this technique in a class a couple of years ago with Loretta Oliver at Convergence Grand Rapids in 2006. Once felted, my daughter sliced the felt into two sections to dry. Those would be the two pick ovals on the right. She also played with a plastic resist and made a heart in the middle of a blue ground. The rest of the samples drying are mine.
Of course we worked too late into the day. Suddenly I realized I needed to get ready to head out to the guild meeting for the Jockey Hollow Weavers, and Liz had to do her final packing, and we were all in a flurry to clean up the mess on the deck and pack up for our respective journeys.
I took my slightly damp samples to the meeting that night, for show and tell, and what I didn’t know, was my daughter went into my zipper stash, and took out a heavy zipper and was seen sewing her two pink felt ovals together with the zipper, while at the meeting, making it into a change purse. I just adore this child!
Brianna also made a log of felt, and did a good job getting it dense enough that she was able to cut it into small rounds, like the ones she had seen when we went to the Fashioning Felt exhibit last spring at the Cooper Hewitt. The ones in the exhibit were larger, more industrial ones, but the same technique could be used for smaller buttons and adornments.
My samples are on the right, all but one are laminated, felted with a layer of silk or lace. My favorite is the orange one, I had a layer of wool roving on the back, and a layer of orange wool I dyed in the crock pot, and on top a thin stretched layer of silk from one of the hand dyed hankies. I’d like to follow up on that sample. I really want to be able to make a jacket from my felt, for teaching purposes, and I think it would be a good stretch for me!
Coming: Four whole days with nothing on the calendar. YeeHa! I get to catch up on my blog, learn how to use my new iPod Touch, which has been sitting on my desk untouched for a week, and finally catch up on some much needed sleep!
