Fabric out of Matted Fiber

Or felting.
Erica and I are making a workshop on felting wool and other naturally fibery things. This will be at the Linus Pauling House on Hawthorn on Monday the 31st of March in association with Cascadia Wild. (My last name is uh, actually spelled with an "F" but this is one of the things that makes me love my last name, I know, I'm weird, I think we have already established this though..moving on!)

Erica came over tonight and we had dinner and then played with wool. It was a lot of fun. I made pork ribs, which gave us drippings enough for a nice pork gravy to go with Biscuits Erica whipped up and She also brought a nice mixed wild foods and garden grown salad complete with flowers that was very tasty. It was so pretty I took a picture of it.




Then we got down to business. Wet felting carded and raw wool. This consists of layering the wool so the fibers in each layer lie more or less perpendicular to each other, dousing it with soapy hot water and massaging it with your fingertips for about 10 mins, flipping it..continue this until you have a solid fabric, rinse, dry, throw in dryer if you wish to full (not fuull, long u, but fulll, short u long double el.) Fulling is when you have an existing fabric of wool (be it felted knit, woven whatever) and then you felt it again. A knit sweater, that shrinks when you wash it and then put it in the dryer is fulled not felted, even though it IS a felting process. (which you should never do to wool knits! Unless you WANT them smaller...) Lost yet?
heee.



The raw wool(not pictured) was harder to felt but closer to a true raw technology than when you add the step of carding the wool. Carding we discovered, not only lays all the fibers neatly in line, but also causes a lot of the debris from the raw wool to fall out (plant material and dirt mostly.) And Erica, being the brilliant woman she is said something like, "Well, that makes sense, it's like when we brush our hair." SO obvious it was too obvious, we both laughed we didn't realise that sooner.



I also played with a fulled cashmere sweater of mine and made a hat from one of the sleeves. I like this hat. I like it so much I then NEEDLE felted it. I'm not done but I took a picture anyways.



Needle felting is when you taker a felted item, (felt or fulled or what have you but, general a wool item) and push little bits of wool into desired shapes and patters using small needles with tiny barbs on them that force the fibers into the main fabric and the hooks push the fiber in, but the slide out all smooth leaving the fibers locked in place.
Pretty cunning, don'tcha think?