Some Wool, Some Soap, and One Fun Experiment

You may recall that last winter I took up needle-felting as a way to justify my fetish for wool roving. Well, after a 4-month absence from needle-felting, my needle-jab induced callous was gone, and my tender new thumb was wincing at the idea of clashing with the felting-needle. To be kind to my thumb, since it has been kind to me, I decided to look for other ways to have fun with wooly fluffs. Enter... wet-felting.

I started small and again experimented first with felted balls. Much less painful, and a much more efficient method compared to needle-felting. I quickly got the hang of it, and by the end of the day had a funky, fluffy new bracelet to show for my efforts.



Yesterday, I decided to try something a little different. I opted to experiment with making flat pieces, as eventually I want to be able to use some new roving that I bought in Charlottetown to make myself a scarf. Here is how the experiment progressed.

I started with a whitish piece of roving:



I wet it, soaped it and manipulated it into this:



And since that was pretty boring looking, and was calling out for more experimentation, I added some swirls of colour from previous roving scraps. I wet it, soaped it and manipulated it some more, and it became this:



And, I realise that it is not the prettiest thing in the world, but I am so darned proud of it. It is one fine and solid felted speciman. I still have more experimenting to do. Much more, in fact. I still need to determine at which point of feltiness the embellishments should be added to have them successfully adhere to the main piece. I was about 50% successful on this attempt, but in the end I needed to needle-felt the swirls into the main, white piece. I did not jab myself though, so my thumb remains tender.

Here are some drool-inducing photos of the roving that I bought at Northern Watters in Charlottetown. Talk about an addictive store.




Hopefully, one day one of these (or both) will become my new winter scarf.