I spent the day being very productive creating felting sheets. I made two for cutting out ready for next weeks lesson and I also created a compositional piece of seed heads which I will work into with stitch following on from last weeks lesson.
I started off by filling up my bowl with hot water and setting up the bubble wrap. Using white merino fleece, I started to pull it apart and began laying it down in one direction but making sure I overlapped a little bit. For the second layer I placed it in the other direction so that they layers will bond together. So like this: -1-1-1. Once I finished layering, I did 4, i placed a piece of netting over and started to wet the fleece with the warm water and began rubbing the bar of soap over it. I then started using my hand to rub the soap into the fleece but i only did this until the fibres started to come through the netting. Once this started to happen i removed the mesh and checked if there was enough water around the edges as they tend to be dry. I placed the fleece onto the towel, still on the bubble wrap, rolled it up tightly and began to roll it like you would a rolling pin. After rolling it 100 times, 1 roll per second, i unravelled it, rolled it back up in the opposite direction and did another 100 rolls. I repeated this until the fleece was firm and if no fibres came up when I scratched it with my fingernail. After this I washed it under cold and warm water to get all the soap out and put it to dry. I repeated every step the same to create the second sheet but this time I did 6 layers in welsh black fleece. It took longer than the merino wool however I had a good outcome in the end. For my compositional piece I did the exact same steps but before adding water and soap I created my design using wool, fleece, and organza. I really enjoyed this lesson because it reminded me of my childhood. I used to do felting with my mum after I had an operation on my foot and I wasn’t in school. We made felt fairies and sold them at fairs. I’ve put in an example of one I made for my summer homework last year.





