Wet Felting Tutorial!

I promised to deliver a picture tutorial of how I did my wet felting piece (see this post). Well, life keeps getting in the way, so I am forcing myself to finally sit down to write and post the tutorial today!

So first of all, I went to Suzanne Morgan's site and purchased her Everything Kit in the Glow colorway.  I was so happy when it arrived that I danced through the post office and out to my car.  As I sat in the car I opened my new treasure and was just taken with Suzanne's ability to put just the right items together to make this kit.  You would think that as soon as I got home I went into the kitchen and prepared my work area for some wet felting.  But, NO-O-O-O-O!  The package sat on the side table next to my bed for almost 2 weeks.  Every day I opened the package and fingered the silks and wool, wondering if I could actually do this without making a mess.  Part of me was not ready to undertake this new art form yet, afraid that I was going to mess it up.  But the artist part of me finally took over and I decided that there is really no way to screw this up.  So I took out my  supplies and started "the process".

OK, to do wet felting you need minimal supplies.  My list includes a large tray that will hold the project while it is being worked, a towel, organdy, bubble wrap, a little soapy water and the fibers that you will be wet fellting (the kit from Suzanne plus a some roving and hand-dyed locks from my own collection.

First, the tray was lined with an old towel that would be used to abosrb any water that escaped from the project.  For the tray, I used the boot tray from The Container Store (the only thing better than shopping there is working there and using your employee discount for your art projects!) On top of the towel  I layered a piece of the mini bubble wrap with the bubble side up, then a piece of organdy, and finally the fibers from the kit (prefelt first then cover that with the torn pieces of silk and the roving.)  I added some hand dyed purple roving and orange locks from my own collection - just because!

The next step was to add some fibers and glitz. I had no idea how this was all going to look when it was finished felting, so I just sort of went with my gut feeling.  When I finally figured out that this looked "pretty", everything was covered with another piece of organdy.  The purpose of the organdy is to hold everything together and keep it from all moving around during the felting process. Kinda  like the way bread in a sandwich holds all the pieces of your tuna salad together.

Finally, I got to add the soapy water - this told me I was finally going to be doing a piece of wet felting, baby!  Now, it only takes a little water, enough to get your prefelt, silk and fibers moist.  The last thing you need is a soggy mess, so remember, just use a little soapy water. It is easier to add more water than it is to take excess water out. Then  cover the whole thing with another piece of mini bubble wrap (this time the bubbles are facing down to agitate your fibers) and get ready to work!

Felting occurs when the cuticle of your wool roving opens up and catches other materials (such as the silk and other pieces of roving).  If you have ever accidentally (or not) thrown a wool sweater into a washing machine with some soap and hot water, you have seen the end result of felting.  Most people believe that it is the hot water that makes the felting process happen, but it is actually the agitation of the fibers that makes felt.  That is why the wet felting process here can be done with only warm or tepid water.  Here the felting occurs when you spend time agitating the fibers between the bubble wrap.  I found the easiest way to provide agitation was to wad up a plastic shopping bag and rub it vigorously over the top layer of bubble wrap. The soap in the water helps to make the fibers "slippery" and the whole process is much easier then.  Even so, it takes awhile to complete the whole process.

Every 10 minutes or so, I stopped agitating and carefully peeled off the top layer of  bubble wrap and organdy. This was to make sure that the organdy was not being caught by the fibers and becoming part of my felted fabric. Then everything was put back in place and the whole piece was flipped over so that I could check that the organdy on the bottom of my fabric was remaining separate, too. Wrap the whole thing back up, flip over again and start agitating again. This is what the "right side" of the piece looked like after 30 minutes of agitation.  I know it looks like you are looking through the bubble wrap on top, but it is gone.  The felted piece is retaining the indentations of the bubble wrap at this point.

So, finally, after a full hour of agitating and checking, my piece was finished!  How did  I know that it was completely felted and would not fall apart?  Simple - it is called the pinch test.  Each time  the top layer of bubble wrap and organza were removed, I would lightly pinch the top layer of fibers between my thumb and forefinger.  If the fibers separated, I knew the felting process was not complete.  Once I was unable to lift the fibers and all were bound together, I knew it was finished. The picture to the right shows my felt after a full hour of agitation,  It has shrunk by about 1/3 from it's original size.  So it was gently taken to the sink and run under clear running water until the water ran clear and all of the soap was out.  the my felt was laid out an a clean, dry towel to dry.  What amazes me the most is that the piece is so strong but so light in weight.


Well, that is all there is to the wet felting process.  My piece is not yet completed, because it still needs to be embellished with tons of stitches and beads.  Maybe even some of the glass beads I made last year in my lampwork bead class.  I will update you all as I work on the piece and you will definitely get to see it when it is finished!

All of You Free Motion Machine Quilters Out There Need to Look at This Blog!

Last week I subscribed to the new  In Stitches  e-magazine from Interweave.  I have had a chance to look through it, but did not make time to actually sit down at the computer and read it until today.  All I can say is WOW!  It is full of some wonderful fiber artists, samples of their work, instructions and patterns.

Today I made time to look at the article entitled "9 Free Motion Designs"  As a free motion machine quilter I know that there is a lot for me to learn.  Well, the article is about Lea Day, who has this amazing blog entitled "365 Days of Free Motion Quilting Filler Designs ". Yes, she is producing 365 days of filler designs, and all of them are amazing.  My regret about finding this blog is that I only found it this morning, and she is already on day 200!  Thank goodness past blog entries are retained, and there is a link on the right side (near the top) that will allow you to see all of the designs she has posted so far.

If you are a machine quilter, you owe it to yourself to check this blog out!  I hope you enjoy looking at it as much  as I did.

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.

Paper Gypsy, Where Have You Been?

Many apologies to those of you who have sent me e-mails asking if I have fallen off the face of the earth.  I wish it were that simple an explanation.

No, I have been working on a family tree for my daughter.  We live a fair distance from any family (Arizona, Vancouver and South Africa), and I want my daughter to know as much as possible about her roots.  So last month I bought a 1 month subscription on the geneology website, Ancestry .com.  Documenting births, deaths, marriages and immigrations has been a lot of fun, but it has also become an obsession.  I find myself sitting at the computer after midnight, looking a census record and immigration passenger lists.  At present there are over 180 people in our tree, and finding out all I can about them has been "interesting", to say the least. It has been a chore to find information on the American side of the family, and the South African side has been next to impossible to find.

But this work has also kept me away from my quilts and my blog.  Instead of just leaving you all in the dark, I thought it was better to sign on here tonight and update you as to what is happening with this site.  And at the same time, I want to go ahead and share some very special photos with you.

The first photo is my parents' (Marge and Wesley Peterson) wedding in 1947, followed by maternal grandparents' (Joseph and Emma Jozwiak) wedding in 1918, and then my maternal great-grandparents' (Josef and Maria Vosmik) wedding in 1879 in Bohemia.

I am very fortunate that my mom and grandmother loved to tell family stories.  And I am especially blessed that they kept tons of photos, letters, prayer cards and obituary notices.  Unfortunately, there is only 1 birth certificate, no marriage certificates and no death certificates in any of the boxes of "stuff" that my mom left me.  The one birth certificate is for a female baby named Emily Clara, born to my maternal great grandmother. Now, I never heard anything about Emily Clara, who would have been my grandmother Emma's sister.  But while researching census documents, I found that Maria Vosmik gave birth to 12 children, and only 5 survived by 1900.  So I can only guess that Emily Clara was one of the 7 children who died as a young child.  It is so sad to think about, but then I remember stories about how hard life was for an immigrant Bohemian family over 100 years ago.

So, bear with me for a few more weeks here, and I promise to return with more news about projects that I will return to. In the mean time, you will find me at the computer, researching my heart out and putting tons of information into a family tree software package. And I will be remembering wonderful days of sitting on the sofa with my mom and grandma and listening to stories of their lives before I was born.

My African Wall Hanging is Finished!

Just want to share a newly finished project with all of you.  This started off as a handpainted wall hanging that was given to me by a very dear friend when I left South Africa.  It has been sitting in the "gotta do something wonderful with this"  pile since 1994.  Well, I have finally trimmed down the wall hanging, added borders and gotten it quilted.  It will hang in either our dining room or master bedroom, not sure which yet.

The birds are guinea fowl,and they are one of my favorite African animals (along with zebras and giraffes). The original wall hanging was 32" X 48" , and continued 4 " on each side of the present thin black border. But this area did not contain any design element, so it was cut off. The remaining original fabric is now the center of the quilt, and it is 24" X 40".  The total piece is 36" X52" with the addition of the 3 batik borders.

One of the hardest decisions was trying to figure out how to quilt this. My daughter looked at it and said, "Mom, they are African animals - that should be clue."  Brilliant!  The overall background quilting of the center is a meandering back and forth stripe - just like zebra stripes!  Among the guinea fowl and zebra stripes I also added a free motion elephant, and giraffe, and a rondavel - a traditional African hut. I am enclosing additional photos that show close -up images of these last 3 items. The first photo shows the elephant, the second shows the giraffe, and the last shows the rondavel.  You can click on any of the photos for a larger view.

As for the borders, the striped batik is quilted with a traditional African motif - triangles.  Geometric shapes are found in many African art forms, a good example is the art of the Ndebele people.  Their clothing and housing are all decorated in straight lined, geometric shapes.  You can see more of their work by clicking here and here.  I am especially enamored of the Ndebele style - I am fortunate to have brought back a beaded Ndebele apron and a beaded Ndebele doll from my time in South Africa.

The final border is quilted with straight lines, to mimic the shape of a frame around a piece of art.  Can't wait to get this hung.  And, I am happy to say, this has gotten me back to thinking about South Africa and my quilting friends there - it is time to reach out and contact them once again.  If you are interested in seeing some other quilts done by South African quilters , you can click here or else you can always mosey over to the links on the right side of this page and click on the link for the Quadrille Quilters under Other Blogs That I Read and Love For Inspiration.

PEEP, PEEP, PEEP!

Now, I can deal with jelly beans, chocolate bunnies and chocolate eggs - they are like the true Easter candy.  I am NOT particularly fond of PEEPS, however.  The sugar coated, yellow marshmallow chickens were not part of my youth, and they seem like some sort of alien  food - all I have to do is look at them and my teeth start to hurt from the thought of all that sugar.  But my hubby loves them, especially when they get a little old and chewy. No, PEEPS were not part of his youth, either.  But nowadays he just loves the little critters. A couple of years ago a friend told me that you can "age" fresh PEEPS by putting them in the microwave and nuking them for 20 - 30 seconds.  The first time we tried this we ended up laughing our butts off as we watched these critters blow up to 3 times their size as the marshmallow heated and made jokes about the PEEPS that Clayton.

So imagine my joy when I found another novel recipe using PEEPS on the Facebook page of my friend Tina.  This is called a PEEPS Sunflower Cake, and is supposed to serve 12. But the recipe calls for 19 PEEPS, and how do you divide 19 PEEPS in 12 servings?  You can find the recipe here  on the Taste of Home website.

I guess you could change the flower up and make it a dahlia or mum by adding a second row of PEEPS on top to make more "petals" .  Then you could change the color of the frosting and the PEEPS as well, and use the pink or purple chickens.  Or you could just forget about it and make an angel food cake with rainbow sprinkles in the batter - at least that looks like Easter.

Do any of you readers have a PEEPS recipe that you would like to share with the rest of us? Just click on "comments" below and share.

Add This Quilt to the Finished Pile

Well, the quilt that was in my photos from my February 16th post - the entry about basting a quilt - is finally finished.  I so love the colors, although they do not appear to be as vibrant in this photo as in real life. Look at the post from February 16th to get a better idea as to the colors.  It only took a week to get this quilted and bound after it was basted.

The pattern is called Illuminata, and was purchased at The Pincushion Boutique quilt shop many years ago.  This is one of their Pressed for Time Patterns, which are designed specifically for use with their Sweet Treats.  I saw Pincushion Boutique at last week-end's quilt show (Guild of Quilters of Contra Costa County) and spent some time looking at their latest Sweet Treats.  I am madly in love with Crocodile Hunter because it has a very African look to it.  Unfortunately, I am counting pennies right now and had to pass.

Overall, I was disappointed in the quilt show this year even thought I won a door prize from Sew Ewe Quilt in Brentwood.  Nothing really grabbed my attention and made me say WOW! at the show, but a few ideas were hatched for using up some of my batik stash.  I just need to find the patterns now. I was also disappointed in the vendors this year. Fewer vendors with fabric meant fewer fabrics to fantasize and drool over. But I think the most disappointing part of the show was learning that The Pincushion Boutique is no longer a brick and mortar store in Davis, although it can still be found online.

So, back to the quilt.  It was marked for quilting with my favorite stencils for machine quilting - Full Line Stencils. The stencil that was used on this quilt is Loopy Square.  The full stencil was used in all of the blocks, and 1/2 of the stencil was used in all of the triangles.  I then did a mimic of the design in the outside border - tall and short loops).  I love these stencils because they are so easy to mark onto the quilt top using  Pounce Pads.  And the designs will then either iron or wash right out after quilting, depending upon the type of Pounce that is used.

OK, that is it for now!  Hopefully I will stay healthy long enough to keep updating this blog on a more regular timeline.  The cold that I had 3 weeks ago just really took a lot out of me.  But I am feeling much better (except for the stupid cough which is still hanging around), so here's hoping you hear from me over the week-end!