Saturday, August 17, 2013

Textured Felts - "Cracked Mud"

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.

But I was most excited about finally having time to try out some of the texture samples I wanted to make.  The first one I made created a look I think is reminiscent of dried, cracked mud.  I was inspired by the tutorial of Love Voronin (http://www.livemaster.ru/topic/61153-idei-iz-moej-kopilki-chast-2?)
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.