Technical problems

I wrote a blog 10 days ago seriously about progress with my course . I took the photos ,and I then left home without them. So this blog will appear later.
In the meantime I have been I have been enjoying my neighbours, David's , Herdwick lambs.

Walking the fells

And testing out weaving and felting combined

Normal service will be resumed soon !

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Pleats

I am continuing my exploration into making pleats in felt .

I have continued to try stitching , masking tape and foil with mixed success. I abandoned cling film , it's just too delicate for me.

Overall my Sucess has been better using scrim than habotai ( pongee). Mostly I think this has been down too the fact that slightly different methods of felting is called for by the two fabrics, because of their different structures but this is hard to achieve when working everything together.

Here some tasters of my successes and failures close up of one big piece of felt.

Foil pleated prefelted scrim, works quite well

Stitched prefelt into habotai, works wells , but the fabric is not well attached to the pleats.

Stitched prefelt into scrim . Works well , is more controllable than the foil technique , but takes a lot longer to do.

Masking tape pleats on scrim , which is pretty effective and on habotai which is not successful . With the scrim the tape can be used to stick two sides of a pleat together , this does not work with the close woven habotai and so it's impossible to get the same effect. Used in a different way I think the tape would be a good way of making bubbles in the silk , by preventing it attaching to fibres trying to penetrate it.

So mixed effects which is a success as that is what I was trying to achieve.

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Framing

I have puzzled for a while on a good way to display my flat felt work. I am really not happy with most of the ways I have seen to directly attach pieces of felt to walls. I want mine to hang vertically which appears to be hard to achieve. As textile works though the feel is important and of course there texture and a lot of this is lost if you frame in a box frame for example .

So I have been testing an alternative technique

First take some stretcher bars , which you can but very cheaply in art shops and are made in a wide range of sizes and hammer them together into a frame.

Then cover them with some opaque fabric of a colour that's sympathetic to your final effect. In this case white. Quickly and easily stapled to the wooden bars.

Attach your felt masterpiece to its backing fabric . Centre on the covered frame , this is probably the hardest task and staple into position, taking care of the corners. Because of the two layers of fabric all your attaching stitching is hidden

Trim the fabric , attach gummed paper tape to give a professional finish.

Here the finished piece. Just a small test piece for now.

Which I am still not sure I have got it completely right , but I am making progress.

 

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