The family went on vacation this last week. I carried along my felting supplies and took advantage of the large dining room table and convenient access to a dryer in the condo to do some felting. I made several laminated prefelts using the dryer so I can run the dye experiments I talked about a couple weeks ago. I need to figure out what dyes I used in my original laminated prefelt resist dyed pieces and I need some felted fabrics to practice on.
Here is a picture of the finished sample: )
To make this, I cut a grid out of resist material. (I use the liner that goes under laminated floors from Ikea, (http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00018076/)
1. I laid down two thin, crisscrossing layers of 19 micron merino fiber in a ten inch square and wet the fiber down with soapy water.
2. At this point, I realized that the outside border on the resist grid was too wide so I cut it down to a smaller size and laid it on top of the wet fiber.
3. I covered the grid lines with another layer of fiber.
4. I then covered the whole thing with two more crisscrossing layers of fiber. The photo below shows the second layer in the process of being added.
5. I wet out the whole stack and felted it until it was a hard fabric.
6. Since it was easy to see the resist grid, I could cut down the middle of each grid line and around the outside edges, freeing the grid.
7. I removed the grid.
8. I then felted the fabric some more to harden the cut edges.
I think it was very successful.
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