Working Hard, Playing Hard

WOW!  I didn't forget about you all - really!  It is just that life has been extremely busy lately, and the blog is always the thing that suffers.  So sorry, will try to not have this happen again.

We have started a business, and it is taking enough of our time that I can consider it to be a full time job compared to my part-time sales job at The Container Store.  But it is fun to be building something along with your husband, especially when it makes money and opens up a whole new financial future.  I will tell you more about it in the coming weeks, but for now, I want to share my adventures in nuno felting.

Nuno felting is a wet felting process that bonds wool roving and (in my case) dupioni silk.  I have always wanted to do this, and have lots of colored wool roving from my spinning adventures, but no colored silk.  So I purchased a kit from Suzanne Morgan (click on her name to see her site),  Suzanne puts the most amazing kits together, which you can see by clicking here . I learned about Suzanne from Jane LaFazio's blog, Janeville.  You can see Jane's finished piece made from this kit here. Jane is best known as a machine felting artist, and you will see some amazing pieces if you peruse her blog. And to add to the fun of all this, I learned about Jane LaFazio from my good friends Judy and Ruth, who went off to Italy for a week to learn watercolor techniques from Jane.

 I purchased Suzanne's  GLOW Everything Kit, added some of my own wool and fibers, and then taught myself how nuno felt and to made this really great piece of felted fiber art.  It is not finished yet, because I still intend to embellish it with floss and silk ribbon embroidery.  It still has a long way to go, and I am not yet sure what it will be when it grows up - probably a framed wall hanging, or maybe a journal cover.  Finished size is 12 1/2" X 18 3/4", so it can't be anything too big when it is finished.  But I am thinking that it will be a lot of fun (but messy!) to make some long, nuno felted silk scarves!

In the next few days I will be posting a tutorial on how this piece was made, along with lots of photos.  It is a very simple process, just takes a lot of elbow grease and space where you can get messy if you want.