Thursday 29 March 2012

Try It Out Thursday : After The Spray...

Remember Monday's post?  Well, having made all that sprayed fabric, I wanted to find something to do with it.  So, when in doubt...yes, you know it.... make a postcard.  I've been making a lot of felt recently, and when I spotted a handful of dyed Wensleydale wool tops that sat beautifully on the sprayed Zeelon, I thought it would be useful to do something with them.  What better than a bit of hand felting?  I've used Lutradur for felting before, but never Zeelon.  So...I positioned the Zeelon carefully on a piece of Lutradur XL that had been cut to postcard size.  I wanted to avoid the scarlet dots which I disliked when I sprayed the original piece, as well as the watermark I created when I tested it for colour fastness. 

Having established I could do that, and which way up I wanted to work, I started trying out the fibres on the cloth.  The first photo, below, shows a wisp of wool tops on the fabric.


 Not a good look; it doesn't show either fabric or fibres to good effect.  So... I moved to this...

...yup, that looks better... and finally to this...

...notice, by the way, that the design has changed a little, has moved across to the right of where I originally started, for no reason other than I like it better.

Why did I use a single needle, and felt by hand?  Because I wasn't using much fibre, and didn't want the holes to appear on the cloth, as they  might have done if I had used a machine, even if I did take out some of the needles.  As it was, I still have holes in one or two places where they shouldn't be... but that's okay.  
My original intention was to felt the fibres straight through the Zeelon and into the Lutradur.  Nope.  I was surprised at how much work it took to get the fibres through the Zeelon, though I suspect that had I used the machine, it would have been much quicker.  I'll fuse the piece together instead.  For obvious reasons, you really don't want to try felting through fused fabrics...

So...what next?  I have a plan, but what would you do?


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