Purple sensation (hand felted scarf!)

I've got a fair coming up at the end of the month so thought I'd better hop to it as regards the felting. Better late than never!

Gosh, my hip was becoming really uncomfortable by the time I finished! It took an afternoon to felt and a day or two of carding. As my friend pointed out to me, I could get a mechanical felt carder, which would save me a lot of trouble....but I do like the magical happy accidents (colours) you get from hand carding. Hm, I wonder if anyone's done a thesis in hand carding.... Do email me if you have, I'd be very interested to hear your mode of thinking, or indeed if you have any ideas or have felted a scarf yourself recently.

Soap yourself silly!

I've been busy making some felt soap - delicious bars of soap wrapped in merino wool. No, you don't dismantle the whole thing to get the soap out, you dip the wool into water and wash with it instad. Yum, yum!

Quack, quackety quack!

Admittedly this is not the best of photos but I thought I'd just show you where my thoughts are at the moment.

So I rummaged through my misfits, nearly-dones and pieces-missing bag, and found this little fella. He was small and perfect, the one problem being his legs, or the lack of them shall we say!

So I looked through a book my mother had given me a little while ago and it had lots of photos of wires with bits of wool being wrapped around.

Anyway, I asked my father if he could make some wire legs, just like the owl and oyster-catcher in the book, and he valiantly rose to the occasion. He took a couple of old electrical cables and cut into them to reveal the copper wire underneath, got his tool box out and started twisting....and he produced these little beauties.

I got my felting needles out, added more wool, and merged the wire into the felt. It looked so good in fact that I decided to forego the wool round the wire effect. Et voila! A little bird...rather rough and ready but it's not bad for a first go!