A tale of two bags

I have been trying out felting the same bag design in Shetland fibre and merino fibre.

From these photographs can you tell which is which?

I expected a difference but was surprised at quite how marked it is.

Shetland fibre, is about 30 microns with a staple of 50- 120mm

Merino about 23 microns and has a 30-90mm staple.

Both the fibres I used had been bought from World of Wool. The Shetland was natural grey and the merino I carded white and black to make grey as it did not have enough predyed grey.

I used exactly the same resist and the only modification I made for the merino was to shorten the cord which i used in the design to strengthen the handle.

In terms of weight they weigh.

Shetland 100g. Merino 75g.

The Shetland was really hard to felt even with loads of water and soap, I never got It to shrink as much as I wanted, The decorations disappeared into the bag itself which is very soft and springy to the feel and visually I think quite flat. The merino was a lot easier to felt , has shrunk more and was more easy to shrink and because of the carder fibres I think looks more interesting. The declaration is more obvious as well.

A good bag experiment. Maybe I'll try it again. What shall I try it with?

 

 

 

 

 

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Rug Design

I have to make a rug , a small rug . After some thought I decided I would use an abandoned collage as the inspiration, I wanted something new , but also something traditional .

I took the design and photoshopped it !. First I made a mirror image then I altered its colours. The colours had to be something that would stand out of the whitish mule background. This is so great to do in photoshop!. Then I spaced it out and gave it a simple border.

Oh yes and I removed one element of the collage with the magic rubber , it's still just visible.

Then my skills at photoshop , or maybe my patience ran out . I wanted a kind of traditional edge , which I decided that I could more easily draw by hand than puzzle over drawing in photoshop.

So here is the hybrid, scrappy looking design.

and here are all the lovely fibres waiting for me, sitting on my scaled up design.

The white fibre is my very special hand scoured and carded mule from woolfest last year. The colours , amethyst, hot pink , conifer and elderberry are merinos from World of Wool. Some already made into prefelts . Ready to felt but......

My instructions say wait for a sunny warm day to make the rug . Here we are in the coldest March in 50 years in the Netherlands so now I will just have to a wait until the weather warms up.

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