SCENT-SATIONAL FELT SOAP

Welcome to my best seller at The Cygnet gallery! These yummy handmade bars of soap (Raspberry Ripple, Apple & Blueberry, Pineapple & Mango, Strawberries & Cream, Rhubarb & Custard.....please don't eat them!) are supplied to me as soap loaves by two fantastic soap makers. After slicing these into soap bars, I wrap them in merino wool before washing my hands what feels like a zillion times to felt them. No olive soap or washing up liquid required - just some netting and some bubble wrap, a bowl of water and a pair of hands.

Once sold, the customer becomes the felter, because every time they wash their hands with my felt soap, the wool continues to felt shrinking down with the bar of soap. At the end of your soap's life, all that's left is a small knob of wool.

Not only that, wool is a fantastic exfoliator for those palms and fingers AND it stops your wash basin getting in a slimy mess!

FELT PATCHWORK POSTCARDS

I've probably said this before but I have a rather large crateful of felty scraps in my house - leftover snippets from various projects, some of which have worked and some of which haven't - and I don't like to see anything go to waste, so I decided to stitch some mini patchworks.

The idea of woolly postcards came from Christa Rolf's book "Stitched Postcards: Beautiful Textile Designs in Miniature Using Quilting and Mixed Media Techniques". I needle felted the felt scraps together (spent a lot of time fiddling around with compositions!) to make a patchwork mosaic just a few mm larger than an A6 postcard, then zig zag stitched them together onto some vilene underlay. And then I free machined lots of wiggly, squiggly patterns and doodles on top to cement everything together and level off the surface (because some of the scraps were denser than others). You then take a blank A6 postcard, attach the patchwork using double sided tape and zig zag stitch around the edges using a stitch width wide enough to trap the outer edges of the felt along with the edge of the postcard. Zig zag stitch around the perimeter about three times, shortening the length of the stitch each time around so that you end up with a really dense yet decorative border.

For that extra special touch Christa Rolf recommends adding some fancy stamps , so I went to my local Oxfam bookshop in Shaftesbury and invested in some classic collector's stamps.  

Now, obviously you can't just pop these felt postcards straight into the postbox - I know, it seems a shame to put them in an envelope like a greeting card but at least you can be sure they will arrive safely!

"NEVER FELT BETTER" felty feeling cards

Let's be honest - the main reason why us felters like to felt, is because of the feelings we feel while/when/after we're felting - those soft handfuls of silky merino fibres, all that rubbing and rolling, AND we LOVE stroking the felt that we create.

The sense of touch is incredibly powerful - we see something we like the look of and our automatic reaction as homan beings is to touch it - clothes, flowers, furniture...

and we use the word 'feel' in our conversations all the time....so out of curiosity I decided to google sayings and phrases which included the words 'felt' or 'feel' (all the happy ones anyway!) and believe me, there were an awful lot of them...

"I FEEL....(an emotion, i.e happy, excited, thrilled, excellent, etc)"; "I FEEL like..." i.e "I've said this before"; "I've never FELT better"; and (particularly relevant for felters) "I FEEL woolly!!"