Resist Felting

So I bought a second hand drum carder that needed a lot of love. I was also given some dirty old and very ordinary alpaca some time back, so thought I would test of the drum carder with the alpaca. There was 3 colours, off white, tan and a small bit of brown. So I thought I would try out resist felting, lets face it, who could resist trying this technique out.

Placed down the clear plastic discs, and soon reaslised that this was going to be impossible, so added coins, and this worked a treat, yes some moved a little, but made adding the brown and the cutting so much easier!

This piece of felt will become a bag eventually.

Also thanks to Jenny Hill of https://www.facebook.com/jhillfelt/ for the great you tube video on this technique!

 

 

 

Hand Spun Naturals

About a year ago, I decided to get my head around spinning, and today I finished a cowl of a selection of various shades and breeds. Shetland, alpaca, finn, corriedale, finn cross (I think corriedale and merino), and the colours are so rich and varied, who needs dyes!

The patterns are taken from the 200 Fair-isle Motifs book, I punch then onto a card, and knitting this up on the Bulky knitting machine. Since I can fair-isle knit well, the machine was more of a challenge. The mix is varied plys, some I had to use single others I had to double up.

Knitting on the machine can also be a little tedious in pattern work, especially all the colour changes, dropped stitches(mainly because of the varying plys).... and dropped stitches in fair-isle is a pain, as on the machine you only see the wrong side so keeping the pattern true is hard work.

So it has just turned summer, so it will be folded and placed in the cupboard all ready for Winter 2016..... I even have left overs that I will throw at the loom Saori style and see what comes out.