Saturday, January 18, 2014

Felted Poppies

I took a felting class last night and it was awesome! The class was dedicated to felting scarfs and I had no idea what to expect when I signed up. Some of the attendees were regulars and soon it turned out that felting on silk (nuno felting) was a favorite among the more experienced attendees. I decided to give it a try, too. First, I was a bit disappointed that no silk in my usual colors like grey or black or a nice red was available (most of the fabric was pink or yellow or baby blue....). In the end, I decided to go with dark green silk and grey wool. This looked rather boring of course and I was looking for a third color to come up with. I was quite worried that the scarf would end up looking homemade or overly creative instead of artisanal and therefore wanted to keep it simple and basic. So I was trying other darkish colors but non of them worked. Finally, the lady with whom I shared the table looked at me and said: you should go with orange! And this was it: I added orange dots and planned to add some black little dots in between.
While arranging, I realised that when I put the black balls on the orange dots they looked like poppies! At this point, I was getting really excited about the whole thing again! The actual felting process was quite labor intensive because of the size of the scarf (you first arrange the fluffy wool on the silk and then you go over the whole thing several times with soap water to rub everything together). But it was so worth the effort! I like how the fragile silk and the rustic wool work so well together. And of course, I love the poppies!