My friend, N and I took a trip to the thrift store one day...
...and bought several large men's wool sweaters.
I popped them into the washing machine on hot for a long wash cycle...
...and dried them in the dryer.
They came out like little, shrunken miniatures of their former selves...
...in other words, fulled.
We did lots of projects with the resulting 'felt'...
...making purses by cutting off sleeves and box-hemming the bottoms...
...even adding little wool roses, made from strips of the sweater, sewn together.
I started (but didn't finish) a pillbox hat...
...and we just generally reveled in the wonderful, cuttable properties of fulled wool...
...so much less fiddly than real fabric, which needs hemming!!
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All week long, as we did projects that were new to me...
...acid-dyeing, working with fulled wool sweaters...
...and even decorating garments with bleach pens (easy!)...
...I was musing about the nature of the fiber arts in general.
What I realized, even more strongly than ever before...
...is that there really is something for everyone in the fiber arts!
I, for instance, don't really enjoy needle-felting...
...and I can't see myself doing more acid-dyeing (too scary!) or sweater-fulling.
Discovering that I really prefer wet-felting to any other fiber art (so far)...
...doesn't feel limiting to me, though, just liberating...
...and who knows when the techniques I've learned doing these other projects...
...will come in handy?
1 comment:
Good for you HEather to find out what's suits you best1! I also try a lot of things out, felted with a sander, needlefelt, felting with washingmachine, etc. But I can only say I LOVE to wetfelt on the traditional way, feel the fibres, get them soapy and soft, nothing can be more saticfying I think.
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