A Few Of My Favourite Felt Things

Here are a few of the things I have been making lately.

ABOVE: Felt flowers. 

These are bigger than my hand and make beautiful brooches, hair accessories or decor items.

ABOVE: Fairy LED lights.

Pods and Hanging Flowers with LED lights that change colours.

ABOVE: Shawl/Vest

These are a nunofelt item that works like a cross between a shawl and a vest.

They are made from hand dyed tissue silk with hand dyed merino wool felted in like leaves.

I am happy to custom make these to fit and in your choice of colours. Contact me via my etsy shop, 

Beljays Felt n Art

 if you want to know more.

Felt Challenges

So I have set quite a few challenges for myself over the last few months. None of them have to do with being more frequent here unfortunately.

The first challenge was a little nuno felt bolero with little ruffles on the front.

The piece incorporates some beautiful silk that I dyed using shibori techniques. The main challenge, apart from designing the pattern of the bolero, was to keep the edges of the silk at the front from felting into the rest of the item. It is these free strips that have created the ruffles.

I was really pleased with the result and entered it into the Queensland Royal Show, known as the Ekka. I was awarded a first prize in felt garments for it.

My second major challenge had been creating a number of felted 2D wall hangings for an art exhibition in Sydney. I had to draw on my long background in painting and combine it with my technical knowledge of felting to make four works (3 here).

 

 

I have to say that they looked pretty good up on the walls of the gallery. They were in good company with paintings, sculptures, quilts and tapestries by other wonderful artists.

Making a Nunofelt Jacket with Lizzie Houghton

The second workshop I attended at TAFTA's Contextart Forum was a nunofelting workshop with Lizzie Houghton. Lizzie is a phenominal felter (and wonderful woman) from England and very well known internationally, so it was a special experience being able to attend one of her workshops.

Twelve of us gathered in the canteen and gym area of our venue and over the next four days achieved nothing short of a miracle under Lizzie's patient direction.

We began with 5 or so metres of silk. I hand-dyed mine some weeks before.

After cutting out the pieces and laying out the wool and surface decoration we began to see something taking shape.

A bit of prefelting

and drying, not easy with the torrential downpour we experienced for 2 days but the sun did finally come out, and we had the makings of some very interesting fabric.

But when we stitched it up and tried it on, it was hard to believe that we hadn't got something wrong. Lizzie assured us it would be okay.

I wasn't until another day of hard work felting and fulling that we saw the wonderful results of this fascinating technique. Who would have believed the shapeless thing in the picture above could turn into the beautifully fitting jacket below.