It’s Been a While…

…since I played with my felting machine. I have a beading project in mind that I wanted to put on a wool background. I have several pieces of wool and some small pieces of silk that I wanted to felt all together for a background for the beads.

The main piece for the background is a very soft wool, even after I tried to shrink it. I laid out all my little pieces of silk and wool and started felting. This is what I had after the first run through.

The silk is NOT nice! It will not play well with the wool. I was able to felt from the back into the silk on the front, but it looks pretty darn bad!

 

It is not a disaster for this project, but it won’t be a set of fabrics I’ll put together for the felting machine again. On this project, the beads will mostly cover up the awful looking bits and what does show will be mostly just for a touch of color.

I also found out that you can, indeed, felt a hole right through the wool! Trying to make things stick together well doesn’t mean felt extra in one spot! Those sharp little barbs just kept going up and down and up and down and chewed up the silk and wool in that little spot. I just put another piece of wool on the back and felted a little bit to fix it, but it’s another lesson learned.

A couple of pieces of yarn completed my background experiments for the day. I had originally planned on a few tiny bits of silk here and there, but since it didn’t felt…that won’t make much difference either.

Then I decided to try another piece of shrunken wool sweater and some yarn. It was okay, but the sweater wool wasn’t completely felted because it still had a bit of stretch to it. I needed to keep the fabric taut as I moved it through the machine.

I still have a lot to learn about what works and what doesn’t on this machine. I need to spend some time with it. It’s a lot of fun playing and I’m always happiest when I’m learning something new!