Latest endeavour - pillows

This is a Tlingit salmon.  I've been carrying the picture this is based on for years wating to be brave enough to attempt it either as a flat piece or in this case as a pillow.  It wasn't until I had finished making the pillow form and starting on the design details that I realized I messed up the tail - I left off the actual tail fin.  So now I get to figure that out in addition to deciding if I'm going to put the designs on the reverse side (I already did the mouth, but nothing else).  I also have to decide if I'm going to extend the mouth a bit.  But it's definitely a start.

Been busy busy

We're solidly in our home once again, most of the boxes have been emptied (or hidden in the garage).  We made it through shearing 2010 and now I've got almost two full season's worth of fiber to work through, plus a bunch I got from a neighboring farm.  Of course now that I've been focusing on the natural colors people are going crazy for my dyed fiber!

Let's see - the latest news was I was a vendor at my first festival - Coupeville Art Festival.  For the month prior to The Weekend Tim started doing the Redmond Market - I'd open and then he'd come in around 10am or so to finish the day.  He's a natural salesman and of course the ladies love to listen to him go on.  I'll definitely get pictures of the man at work at the next market.

Anyway, I was working to make as many laminate scarves as possible - hand dyed silk blended with alpaca.  Even the ones I had to redo a bit turned out well - I thought anyway.  My favorite was a simple blue silk with black alpaca.  I thought it would be the first item to sell when the Festival opened.  Needless to say it didn't.  Sadly we didn't do as well as I had hoped that weekend and I have to say that the 90 degree weather didn't help.  The lady in the booth across the way as a hoot so all in all I had fun, but I doubt we'll do a festival in summer again, unless my non-seasonal items do well.

I've also decided I need to revamp the booth layout, again.  I'm going to get hooks that allow the scarves to drape better and have something for the hats and purses. 

I've been going through Pat Spark's book, "Making Faces" and I'm putting the finishing touches on the moon I made.  I've got the cheeks and teeth to do to try and make it not so frightening, but it's almost done.  It's so soft and my next one will be better - I hope.  But this is part of what I'm calling non-seasonal.  I'm also working on more flowers and small animals.  I'm out of all of them so I think I may be on the right track. 

a quickie

Here are my hats - the red one is a combination of rust/red huacaya and the white is from suri.  The two green hats are highlighted with silk hankies and these were all done on a lissome ball.  I'm going to try and do one a day for a while because it's actually a lot of fun especially when it comes to putting the nylons on the fiber-wrapped ball to hold the fiber in place while it gets bounced to start the felting process.

Hats for the last few days

And yarn.  I'm plying the singles I spun up last year at the Redmond Market - around making a few more hats.  I had some leftover hearts from a scarf I made a while ago and they worked perfectly as prefelts.  This is a bit on the small side, but I think it's cute.

I've got the pictures of the start of this when it looked like a big, green, fuzzy blob, wrapped in the nylons and this is what it looked like as soon as I took it off the ball.  The shiny stuff you can almost see inside is from the thin layer of silk hankies I used.

Here is my son, Edyk, modelling (mainly so he can stay up and watch some TV).  The highlights from the hankies are a bit more visible.  This is also after it took a "hand wash" tumble in the washer (front loader - yay).

Finalist with Camelid Quarterly

This is going to be a quickie - I just found out that my "Suri 'n Silk" felted scarf made it into the finals of Camelid Quarterly's Natural Fiber Showcase.  I'm amazed because the picture was not good (alright it was really bad) and the other entries are so gorgeous.  Anyway - it's there in www.llamas-alpacas.com/showcase if anyone wants to check it out.

Now that we're back in the house, sort of, I'm starting work again on suri 'n silk as well as other scarves and hats and such.  I've got about a month before the market season really gets going!

the pictures say it all

I think everyone got tired of my grumping about everyone sitting on their butts while I worked!
Edyk is spinning, he turned out his first 1.5 ounces of 2-ply merino yarn yesterday. Roman is running alpaca fiber through our PG Triple Picker and Tim is working on his NZAK circular sock machine.

And the momentum continues

I didn't fib - the pile of fiber at the end of my last post went into this lattice scarf.

I ran it in my felting machine for 10 minutes, unrolled it and rolled it in reverse and ran it another 10 minutes to get it to this stage. I laid out a single layer for all the lattices except where they intersected. At those points another "shingle" of fiber was laid down for extra strength.

Once I got it started I put it in my Laundry Alternative spinner:

I thought it made a cool kind of "spin art" (-:

I hand fulled the piece and there was significant shrinkage. The red, dyed huacaya, fulled much more easily than the black, natural black huacaya. It has been a while since I did some hand fulling and watching and feeling it shrink as I worked it was very rewarding.

After this I worked on hand fulling my test suri scarf and now I'm considering needling it for a while. If it responds to that I'm thinknig that a Felt-o-Matic by Dianne Stott to speed that part of it up might be a good investment. Since I'm serious about focusing on suri it could be a good investment.

Finally this is a scarf I started today - started this on the felting machine and this shows the shrinkage from hand fulling with the bubble wrap and the wash board.

Edyk spinning merino roving

Edyk, our youngest son, has decided that spinning is a good idea. I'm not sure if it's because he knows he can watch TV while he does this, genuine interest or what. But he started spinning on Thursday. He carded the alpaca with my hand cards, put the drive band in place (a tricky maneuver) and worked his way through the fiber he carded. He wouldn't let me take a picture of it and I thought that was it as far as his spinning adventure was going to go.

To say I was surprised when he asked where the roving we bought a while ago was is an understatement. Last night I had offered to let him use that roving until he was comfortable with spinning, but I really didn't expect much. The pictures tell the whole story.

I'm wondering how long it's going to take him to ask to use my e-spinner?

finally, back in business

We got a new camera last night so I'm back in business updating the blogs today!

I'm trying to do seasonal scarves this year and this is my first. As you can see it's a bit thin at the edges, but with some hand work ala Lori Flood (I had a fantastic felting workshop with her last August and learned a ton of things, including how to encourage the fiber to migrate to the thin spots).

The other end is much more stable, but I still did quite a bit of hand work on it to make sure it shrank evenly along the length. I also wanted to make sure that the hearts were firmly in place.

I made the hearts as prefelts - I needle felted almost a dozen in a variety of colors for the scarves I'm going to work on the rest of the week.

Here's the scarf after doing a few minutes of fulling by hand. You can see how much it's shrunk compared to where I started. And the ends both look nice and solid. My one quibble is that the one end that was on the inside for the last roll on the machine shows the bubble wrap pattern vs the other end.

I was going to throw it a bit to see if I can beat the pattern out, but I'm pretty happy with it as is so I'll probably leave it and start my next one.

My next scarf is going to come from this pile of fiber

Assorted Fiber projects this weekend

This is me plying my two suri singles while watching "Ice Station Zebra" last night. This is the same yarn I started when i got my e-spinner, Essy, last Saturday. Each single is about 3.5 ounces and I finished plying just as "Where Eagles Dare" started - It was "movies based on Allistair Maclean books" night last night. When I'm done here I'll wind this off into a skein and start some brown huacaya from our boy Evgeny. If Tim gets going on the scarves with his sock machine he might be able to make one using this yarn!

I started a scarf earlier using white suri fiber and red/yellow silk hankies (finished project below). I completed that and it's now drying over a chair. I decided to do another scarf using the suri. I also decided to not be as careful about the fiber layout this time around - which is the chaos in the picture to the left. This is actually a picture of two layers of fiber. I did a total of three and then filled in the thin spots after the first round on my machine.

In case I didn't post this before - this is my felting machine. It's a Celtic Moon Princess. Projects can be up to two feet wide and the length is only limited by what can fit between the rollers. It won't completely full the felt, but it comes awfully close. The last step for most of my projects is to go for a vinegar rinse in my front loading washer. I don't have that in the rental, but I found out today that our builder can hook mine up at the house sometime this week - yay!!!

This is the result of the chaotic fiber layout. I left the edges alone to keep with the primitive or organic look. The locks are visible in the felt which is another cool effect. This will definitely go in my Charlie line of scarves. At some point I'll beat or rub the pattern left by the pool mat. Sometimes I leave it because it can make the lace felt look even lacier.

This is the final result of the suri with silk hankies scarf. You can't see the edge that didn't felt to the body of the scarf. That happened because I didn't do the plastic right for the straight edges I wanted on this scarf. What I did instead was put plastic between the edge and the body so instead of a nice straight edge I had what you see in the last picture.

Instead of folding the stray fiber over to the body of the scarf, somehow the plastic was folded between the body and the fiber. The edge looked straight but obviously wasn't. I'm probably going to have to try and needle this edge into place or simply snip off the excess fiber.

My New Toy!

This isn't directly felting related, but it's my new Hansen mini-spinner. Yes, the slight blurr is from it running while we were heading to Snohomish in the truck. This little beast has a regular wall power adapter as well as a cigarette lighter adapter! It's the quietest electric spinner I've heard and weighs in at around 4lbs. That's a jumbo woolee-winder too!

I've decided to use my Ashford when I'm at craft fairs and such since it's much more what people expect of a spinning wheel AND I rarely have power available. But for the most part this is now my spinner of choice and it's making short work of the suri I'm spinning in the picture.

As for felting - I had to return Chad's book to the library, I'm sure to her relief based on my first hat! I do have a few of her other books and Jorie Johnson's that I will be using as a guide/goad to keep me felting. But I'm going back to my scarves to get some made for Valentine's Day. I've got some beautiful hand dyed silk from Lori Flood and I'm determined to make one scarf from each piece. I'm also going to try 100% suri for one of those scarves.

Suri is the harder of the two types of alpaca to felt, but the results are usually worth the work. I've got a "cloud" of white suri fiber that I will be using for this effort. I'm also going to prefelt some hearts in a variety of colors and sizes to felt my other scarves, both laminate and straight felt.

I'm also not giving up on the hats!!! There's just not enough time in the day - the usual lament.

This Isn't a Habit Quite Yet

I actually finished the hat back on the 1st, at least I took it as far as I thought it was worth taking. Now that the wind and fog have let up I can post pictures. Although before I started this visual and written record I doubt it would have ever seen the light of day, but anyway here it is in all it's hairy glory. I meant to have my sons model it, but they're off cleaning our pastures. If you compare the pictures you can see the amount of shrinkage. What you can't see is how hairy it is, even after trying a sweater shaver on it.

Interestingly it took less time to lay out the fiber and pattern than it did to create the felt. When I make a scarf, especially if I put any designs in it, it takes a lot longer to lay out the fiber than it does to work the fiber to felt. It also took a lot less time to full the hat to this point than I thought it would. Alpaca can take a while to get going, but once it starts to entangle it works pretty quickly.





As can be seen, the ear flap things are closer to being neck warmers, but at least this looks more like a serviceable hat than it did when I started. I could probably get it even harder if I worked it a bit more, but I'm quitting while I'm ahead - on this project anyway.

It isn't quite what I had planned on when I started, but at least it's gotten me felting again.

I think I'll try and find something I can do using a lissome/gertie ball. All my other hat forms are packed and it'll be another two months before I can get them back. But I do have the lissome balls right now - hmmmm.

The first day of 2010 - my family and I are relieved that 2009 is over. It started badly and didn't end very well and the middle part was pretty horrible too! I'm not going to say that 2010 will be better, has to be better or at least couldn't be worse because I feel that's tempting fate a bit too much!

The picture is of my hat that I started a few days ago. I didn't have my camera handy so couldn't take the pictures of wetting the fiber with my soapy solution, rolling it up with the resist and extra plastic in place to keep the sides from felting to each other and then putting it in my felting machine to work for a while.

Once the felt was pretty solid I began working it by hand, rinsing and re-soaping as needed. My guide was how spongey the felt was as I worked it against my washboard.

The "tails" I added were originally going to go on the top of the hat, but I decided that they would also work like the chains on tire flaps. They're in place to keep the ear flap things down. The only problem is that for the ear flaps to act like ear flaps I've got hours of fulling/hardening ahead of me. So I think I'll work it a bit more and then call it good. The "root" of these tail ends didn't take very well so I'll be doing a bit of needle felting to give them a stronger connection to the hat.

Unfortunately the wind and rain have kicked up which is interfering with my picture uploads. The last one I was trying to add was of the back of the hat - it's very long, at least to someone's shoulders - which shows why the ear flaps aren't really ear flaps. I don't think anyone has ears that big or low on their head.

My plan now is to work it a bit longer to harden it a bit more, which will also shrink it some more. Then I'll rinse it in vinegar and spin it dry in my laundry spinner. Then get my husband or sons to model it. It's hairy enough that I'll try and shave it with the sweater shaver I just got - but I have a feeling there's just too much needing to be done for that little tool.

Happy New Year!!!