Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Exploring the New - Nuno Felting!

All right, you're going to have to promise not to laugh when you get to the end of this blog.
I made my first attempt at nuno felting.
Nuno felting is a process by which you felt using a sandwich method.
Fibers are forced from one side of the sandwich to the other.
Since I am new to nuno felting, I made my sandwich using cheese cloth, wool roving and silk from recycled saaris.
Follow along with me now.
 I began to make my sandwich by taking bits of roving and placing them over bubble wrap and plastic.
I found my recycled sarri's yarn.
I added bits of silk fiber to the roving.

I added the center of my sandwich which was the cheese cloth.

I repeated my fiber mix with the roving on top of the cheese cloth.

I added more silk to the sandwich.

I rolled the entire sandwich up, including the plastic wrap and bubble wrap, around a piece of pvc pipe about the size of a large rolling pin.
I wet and rolled the sandwich until the fibers began to force their way through each side of the cheese cloth.
Here you can see the fibers coming through and the shrinking begin.
As this happened, I began to wet felt the sandwich.
Then more shrinking happened.
I ended up with about a 50-70% shrinkage rate on this piece.
What was meant to be a scarf turned into a scarfette.
Now, you promised not to laugh.
Here's the finished product.
Oh, I forgot to tell you that I did cut holes in it for effect.
No laughing now.
This is my first nuno felted scarf.
It's really much prettier in person.  What looks like dark blue is really a rich purple!
Now, I have to finish it, but I'm not sure.
I do think I'll enjoy wearing it!
Now, I want to use some better fabrics like silk chiffon.  Wool is supposed to be a perfect blend with that fabric.
More to follow later.

1 comment:

Maggie said...

I think it's very pretty. It's always hard to tell size in photos, but it looks like it would be a pretty wrapped a couple times around the wrist bracelet if it is as narrow as I think it it.