Wet and Needle Felting

 After  Janet made her piece of felt at the February meeting, she decided to embellish the piece by needle felting these beautiful colourful flowers onto the surface. For a first attempt at needle felting this is wonderful.

Janet  then chose to make another piece of felt based on a photograph of Slater  Bridge taken when she was out walking  in the Little Langdales. The colours  are representative of the lakes on a fine day. I can't wait to see what it looks like when finished.

Thank you Janet for two super pieces of felting and I think you have been bitten by the felting bug!

Requirements List for Silk Paper - April Meeting

 

April Raffle - Blossom

 

The raffle colours for this month are the colours of blossom.

Snippet Dyeing with Procion - Anne Covell and Thelma Todd March meeting 2022

 Members arrived with bags full of natural materials, threads and odds and ends ready for dyeing. They were greeted by the jewel-like colours of bottles of procion dyes already  mixed and ready to use.

For ease of use smaller amounts of dye had been decanted into yogurt pots.

We were also provided with made up bottles of saline and soda water to enhance the dyes and help them penetrate the fabrics.

It was recommended that we did not use more than three colours at a time so that we did not end up with "mud".

We made little batches of fabrics and then added small amounts of our chosen colours with a dash of salt and soda water.

Immediately the dye began to penetrate the fabric and the colours began to mix with extraordinary results.

There were lots of oohs! and aahs! as a whole variety of colours began to emerge from the dyed pieces.

If you look closely you can see a whole variety of fabrics including cotton, silk, viscose,  bamboo, linen and paper. Amongst the bits and pieces you can see threads, buttons, silk rods  etc.

Once the dye had been wiped from the pot the dyed pieces were transferred to plastic bags so the dye could set for 24 hours. Members took home lots of little bags of dyed snippets to wash the next day.

The fabrics were then rinsed, washed, rinsed again and left to dry.

When dry they can be ironed and soon we are going to use them at another meeting.

It is fascinating how all the different fibres have a different take up of the dye as you can see in the picture below.

A big thank you goes to Anne and Thelma for leading this fun and useful workshop, and preparing everything for us in advance.

Everyone enjoyed the dyeing and we are all looking forward to using the snippets.