Slow down, you move too fast…
When it comes to making felt, slowing down isn’t really an option. It is -usually – laborious, elbow-aching and monotonous. For someone like me who managed to break both arms and chip an Olecranon (little bone in the elbow joint) a couple of years ago, making felt veers between painful and downright impossible.
Thanks to the girls in Community Crafts in Carmarthen, I learnt how to needle felt. Needle felting uses a barbed needle to push fibres into each other or a base fabric, creating a bonded surface. I have used natural fleece to produce images that are almost like charcoal or pastel sketches. The beauty of using natural fleece is that there are slight colour variations in the fibres so you get a shaded, tonal effect as a by product of the technique.
Ces i fy ysbrydiolaeth am Hirwaun gan gerdd R.S.Thomas, sef The Journey. Rydw i’n defnyddio barddoniaeth fel man cychwyn fy gwaith yn aml iawn.
So needlefelting works very well to get a drawn image on a base fabric. It’s a little more difficult to get a dense background effect that can be embroidered over. There’s a possibility that the newly bonded fabric will distort under the pressure of stitches – particularly when the stitcher has an unhealthy obsession with French Knots. To overcome this, I tend to always use a base fabric but that, in itself, creates bulk which can lead to problems when it comes to framing. I used Haulwen Craft’s Merino Batts to create this picture.
The other problem with this density of needlefelting is the amount of time it takes to do. If only, there was a short cut to the actual process of making felt. Something that allowed you the control of arranging fibres but did the hard graft of actually felting the wool.
A big round of applause then goes to the ever patient and talented Lorraine Pocklington of Greenweeds for letting me use, and the Arts Council of Wales for funding, her Groovi Felting Machine. (You can read more about Greenweeds here and more about Arts Council of Wales funding here.) Last Tuesday, I left home at 4.30am – yes, you read that right, 4.30am – to get to Lorraine’s Art Studio in Aberystwyth by 10.30am. I had with me all of the Merino Batts I’d bought from Haulwen Crafts (you can read more about them here). I started off by arranging fibres from the batts in exactly the same way as I would have done if I had been wet felting them.
There, however, the similarity stopped. If you want to find out how I got on, catch up on next week’s blog. In the meantime, if you are learning Welsh, here are some important words for you:
Felting Machine – Peiriant Ffeltio
Needlefelting – Ffeltio gyda nodwydd
Wet Felting – Ffeltwaith gwlyb
I was inspired by – Ces i fy ysbrydiolaeth gan