And now for something completely different!
I had been reading about wool and about felting, and thought that I would like to see if I could make some nice-looking felt.
This experiment was just that – an experiment. I made a pattern with two colors, in the small. My goal was to see how the patterns came out when felted, to see how much shrinkage there was, and to get a feel for the whole thing.
I sort of have a plan to make a sturdy bag, but before I go that far I just want to see about shrinkage, predictability of pattern, etc.
I was careful to choose untreated 100% wool. In this case, a wool and alpaca blend, but it was right for felting. More expensive than my first few experiments due to all natural.
Here’s the yarn:
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The weaving, according to what I had read, needed to be very loose. I only used approximately every other dent in the heddle – you will see that the warp is widely spaced. And, I did not really beat the weft at all, just slid it to attempt to equal the warp spacing in the weft.
Here are a couple of pics of the piece before getting it wet:
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The long gaps were, I thought, to give a gap between 4 sample pieces.
I tried washing the piece in warm water in the sink, being gentle as the weft endings, not really being beat close, were prone to coming loose. In the future I need to do something about that. Washing that gentle way had no visible effect on the piece, so I bit the bullet and put the piece in the washing machine, on a regular cycle, with a few towels so it wouldn’t feel lonely. That did produce a result!
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Felt! But it was all scrunched up, and it took a lot of heavy fingering work to get it remotely smoothed out into something that could be cut. Then I simply used scissors and cut out the 4 squares that were my pattern attempts. What had started as 6″ by 6″ loose pieces turned into 4″ by 4″, maybe 3″ by 3″ pieces, that were not that well-formed. I had to work them into shape.
Anyway, the final result was 4 coasters, 100% wool/alpaca, and some interesting patterns:
I am not sure where I am going with this. It was interesting, it was an experiment, but for me, there seemed to be too many places where I was not in control of the process, and just hopeful. I would like to create things on my loom for which I have a strong prediction of how they are going to turn out.
It is likely that I have much more experimentation to do with felting if I want to become proficient in that craft. But I also have a yen for some other weaving forms. I think I am going to make a nice wool/alpaca scarf (Terry’s idea) with what’s left of the yarn, since it is really nice yarn. And of course warn whoever gets it that it is 100% wool, and so washing it should be done with extreme care.