June Vessel

I confess.

I am a bad blogger.

I have been working away, doing things, and just not sharing them.

I will try and rectify that.

Here is June.

In March.

I know.

June's inspiration came from the Craft College's Graduation ceremony. We have a Native Art's program and last year we had a Native Elder give a blessing at the ceremony. She spoke of the Mother Earth and how we were all part of the trees and the sky and the water. We are one with them and they are one with us.
I thought that it was lovely and made a vessel that somewhat reflected the idea.
I laid out the fleece in the approximate colours and shapes of trees and sky. Some of the trees are closer and those I stitched to give a little definition.
This one was in a gallery show and was actually purchased.
It was wonderfully validating.

May

It is June 1st, so it is time to reveal the May vessel!

I conceived of the idea for May early in the month but just never got around to doing the vessel until just the other day.

When felting with a flat pattern, which is how I make my vessels, you have to be very careful about how you work the edges. If you rub too hard, too quickly, you can end up with something that looks like Saturn, with a rim around the center instead of a smooth, round form. I thought that I would take this idea and push it a little.

Here is the beginning. I started by laying out what would be the bottom and adding a piece of bubble wrap into which I had cut a circle. This was laid down and a rim of fleece was added to make what would hopefully be a ruffle. The flat pattern was then put down and more fleece added.

Then more layers of bubble wrap and more fleece. You can see that there are quite a few layers here!

I wet everything down and felted. And felted. And rubbed. And felted. And so on and so on and so on...... There were a few areas that burst their seams and required some patching. And more felting.

Here is the final vessel. I will be honest in saying that it was not quite what I was expecting. I was hoping that it would end up being taller and the ruffles a little more...well...ruffly!

I was hoping to get something reminiscent of a Spanish dancer and ended up with a sumo wrestler playing dress up.

I think that this is an idea that wants to be revisited in the future.

Disappointing

I am sorry to have been so silent lately in terms of my Felted Vessel Project, but it turns out that March is an abject failure. Well, maybe I should be quite so harsh. I did learn a lot. Isn't that usually the way though.

If you remember (it was so long ago in time, but only a few posts) March was inspired by seeing street lights at night from an airplane. This necessitated finding streets upon which to set some lights.

Google maps came to the rescue. I started in Ottawa and "flew" towards Montreal ( the one place even I recognised from the air) and stopped when I found a particularly pleasing arrangement of streets. Just as I had no idea what towns I was flying over, I have no idea of the name of the particular town that I used. A print out and a couple of enlargements later, I had my streets. I had to do a bit of creative rearrangement to make a flat town fit on a curved surface, but through diligent application of scissors, managed to come up with a pleasing arrangement.

Through trial and error, I decided that the best way to mark out my town was to lay "lights" along the streets, and some how mark them.

preparation of pattern pieces

Enter the tiny hole punch (1/8th of and inch) and dressmakers chalk.

Patterns, chalk, and holes

Next came the punching. Hundreds of little holes. To punch effectively, I put a dowel into the vice, the vessel onto the dowel, and with my trusty hammer, beat the thing into submission.

Punching holes like nobody's business

After a while, the center of the dowel would be so chewed up as to not actually work as an effective brace against which to punch, so I also had to saw the end off the dowel several times.  Actually, this was a job that I pawned off on my wonderful husband.

A pooped punch pole

I was left with a bunch of small felt plugs. Every 5 or 6 holes, I would have to stop pounding and dig the plugs out of my punch. I ended up buying a couple of more punches, which turned out to be a good thing because I damaged my first punch a short while later.

Doughnut holes

and the doughnut

Next, I started to stitch the beads in. This in itself was a trial. I had finished the punching the night before I, my mother, and my friend Sarah were scheduled to leave for a Fibre Arts Retreat in Nova Scotia. The drive was about 5 hours and I felt safe that between going and coming home, I would have enough time to stitch my vessel. Not to mention that there would be time to stitch when I was not spinning, eating, etc.

I was right. I had plenty of time to stitch. I thought that I might not have enough beads so before we left, I ran to the store and found some more gold beads. What I didn't figure was that the beads were a slightly different gold. Not much of a difference, but enough of a difference that I couldn't use them.
If I had been at home, I could have taken the beads out of my trial piece, or run back to the store to see if I could find the right gold colour. As it was, I ripped the beads out and started to stitch with the new beads. I managed to get most of the stitching finished on the drive home (thanks Mamoo for driving!)

Finished....or is it?

Beads all in, and all of the same colour, it was done, but all of the manipulation that it gone through had left it somewhat.....floppy.  No worries, I thought. I'll pop a balloon into it and give it a quick felt to firm it up a bit.

Smart eh?

Not so much. It seems that there were a few places where I had punched the holes a little too closely and with the further manipulation the holes actually ended up acting like perforations in paper.

They tore a bit.

And created holes.

@#&^%$% holes!

As you can see in the "finished?" picture, there was still snow on the ground. It was actually just a couple of days into April when this happened and I have to say that with everything else that has been happening in my life, it acted as a bit of a gumption trap. It took me a couple of weeks to decide how to proceed.

First was to decide to start on April without having satisfactorily finished March.
Second was to decided on April.
Third was to accept that I will be redoing all this work and using my hard earned knowledge of what not to do, hopefully end up with a successful piece.

But give me a couple of months to get up the gumption to punch all those holes again!

New Journey

I have decided to make 12 felt vessels in the year 2012. One each month. They shall be named after the months of the year and I will complete each vessel within that month (give or take a few days).  They will all start out with the same template and each will be inspired by something about that month. It might be something that happened to me or something about that month that stands out.

Sounds easy enough. And so far it has been. Sort of.

January was simple. One day, I looked out the kitchen window at our new view of the back yard and was intrigued by the juxtaposition of the white snow, the blue sky, and the starkness of the bush that currently resides in the yard.

January, as I mentioned, was simple.  No new techniques. No need for any extraordinary measures. I made my template and set to work. First try and I had almost exactly what I envisioned. The bush was a little lighter than I had wanted, but after seeing the snow blow around a few days later, I felt that it captured January perfectly.

By the way..... I know it's March. I know that I am starting this documentation a wee bit tardy. The photo above was even taken in March, though the vessel itself was created in January, along with the idea to do a felt journal. But better late than never!

Published!

Well, actually I am going to be published. Last winter there was a call for submissions for a new Lark Book for the 500 series. It was 500 felt objects. I submitted 5 pieces along with over 1000 other pieces.  The final decision was suppose to be made by December. I heard nothing and so though that I had not been selected. Good enough, I thought.

Last week one of my collegues asked me if I had heard anything from the selection committee to which I could reply "no". She then told me that they selection committee has to take until February to decide and that letters were in the mail for those that had been selected. "Second chance!", I thought, but still didn't expect much. And Wednesday when I arrived home, there was a letter stating that I had had not one but TWO pieces selected to be in the book! There is no money involved but I do get a free book and I do get to say that I have been published!

The second image will have to wait. There seems to be some issue with blogger not wanting to upload it. Oh well. Maybe I'll make you wait until September!

Cocoons

For those of you who don't like talk of mayhem concerning bugs....look away. Nothing for you here folks. Move along.


For the rest of you, I purchased some silk cocoons a couple of months ago. I got a kilogram. I know it would be a lot, but I didn't realise that it would be about two grocery bags full! I now have a lot of cocoons to experiment with! I gave a few away to one of the graduating students that expressed an interest in them but still have plenty left.
Last month I led a silk scarf dyeing workshop for which I mixed the dyes ahead of time. I wasn't sure which colours people would like, and I knew that I had at least 9 people and I wanted to make sure that no one ran out. I mixed way too much dye. There was a lot left over.
So dyed some warps and wefts. Enough for 16 scarves. And still there was dye left over!
I dyed some soy silk  and still there was dye left over!
So I searched around for something else to dye and found my cocoons! I dumped them straight in the bottles of dyes and added some of the dye fixative and shook. No pictures of this because my gloves were covered in dye by this time. The silk scarves need to sit for 5 days. I let my cocoons sit for 2 before realizing that they looked really dark. It was hard to distinguish the black from the green from the purple. The red was easy too pick out. I dried them out and they sat.
Then I did my residency in the very humid museum where I had my cocoons on display. Then I packed them up is a Ziploc bag and came home.
Bad idea as it turned out.
About a week later I was digging through my stuff and found my bag of cocoons. And they were MOLDY! ARRRRRGGGGHHHHHH! I brought them out side, washed them in the bag with the hose several times and decided that they must be dealt with right away. Grrrrrr.
Into the dye pot they went with some sythropol and baking soda. And they simmered for a while. And it smelled kind of gross.

Cocoons being rinse. they smell much better now.

But the good news was that all that boiling pulled a little of the dye out and I was able to distinguish the colours. Sort of.

They little pupa that did all the work. In the you tube videos I watched, the people giving the tours said that you could eat these guys. they were good and full of protein. I think I'll pass.

I guess that boiling them for a while wasn't quite long enough because I didn't managed to boil all of the sericin out of them. As a result, Mira, who helped with the stretching, and I managed to pull them into some pretty interesting shapes with interesting little lumps and bumps in them. I was amazed at how firm they still were and how had you had to pull them in order to stretch them out.

We pulled about 5 or 6 trays worth. She has already used some of hers in a small felt dress for a felted alien that she is making. Mine are still languishing waiting for me to put on my felting cap again. I am busy weaving and trying to breath in all this heat and humidity.

I love weaving

I noticed this the other day when I was winding a skein to dye some weft. I thought that it expressed the way that I feel about yarns and fibres in general. Although it seems lately that I have been having a hard time getting things done. And an even harder time getting things documented. Couple that with kids that have pretty much taken over my computer and you have a serious lack of posting.
Spring is here though. About a month earlier than it normally is so I hope that means that I will soon be taking more pictures and feeling more like blogging.

Right now, my WIP are numreous. I have hand dyed merino/cashmere/nylon on the wheel. I am almost done spinning and can soon start plying. I just have to finish that last little bit of spinning. Hmmmm.

Also there are two pairs of socks on needles. One pair was the left over yarn form the pair that I knit for Liam and I thought that there might be enough to get most of a second pair, but alas, no. SO I just have to dig in my stash to find something  that will go with the mostly dark blue yarn that I dyed a couple of years ago. They will not be prefect, but they will be warm.

Not much yarn left on the left eh? Thank fully they are at the same place right now so I can make them look like an eccentric pair. That's my plan and I'm sticking to it.

The other pair of socks is with Lornas Laces yarn that I won in a draw a few years ago. I had started a couple of pairs of lace socks but lace needs too much attention for me to knit successfully. These are plain jane socks that will be pretty and that is good enough for me for now.

I also have a warp on the loom. More about that later but here is a sneak peek.

And lastly I have felt vessles in various stages of compleation or experimentation.

Add to that a couple of application forms that I need to fill out and TAXES (ick) and general family life and I'm finding that I have little time or energy left for blogging.
Here's hoping that the spring will change all of that.

Hurdie Gertie Ball?

Today the Fiber Arts Network had a Gertie Ball workshop. And what might a Gertie Ball be?
It is a inflatable ball that you can felt around!

Trish was our host and workshop leader. She lives about 10 minutes outside of Fredericton. Here is her view. Quite stunning, eh? If you pardon the chair cushion and the other eager photo happy friend.
The first thing that we had to do was chose the size of our ball and blow them up. They came with a small plug and the ball was put plug down into a small bowl so that it wouldn't roll around.
We then put wool batts draped over the ball, a second layer was wrapped around the ball.
Here is Grim. he is Trish's dog. He is only a year and a half old and he is so well behaved! He hung around, checked all of us out, and once he found out that we were friends of mom's, he never said another word.
We put a third layer of wool around the ball and any embellishments that we would like.
Next came the pantyhose. The legs were cut off and the body was stretched over the fleece.
A second and a third pair were put on going in different directions so that all of the fleece was covered.
The wool and ball were the wet down and rubbed for about 5 minutes.
And then we dribbled our fleece covered balls on a solar pool cover for about 5 minutes. Talk about a muscle workout!
We then checked to see if our fleece had felted. Once it reached soft felt stage we were able to remove the pantyhose.....
And pull the plug and deflate our ball.
Were then had to start to felt by hand. This required rubbing and rolling.
Here are out finished felt. Some are hats and some are vessels.
And then we ate! It was a pot luck and everything was good!
What a wonderful way to spend a Sunday afternoon!

Hairy Scary Yarn

A couple of years ago, I inherited a bag of fiber from a former teacher. In it were a couple of hanks of jute. At the time, I didn't spin, but I thought that it looked pretty cool and I liked the colour and so I tucked it away for "later".

Later actually came. I have been working on a couple of felted vessels (here and here) and I decided to do some knotless netting on them as well as some beading. On the smaller, rounder blue one I used waxed linen and some glass beads. The shape reminded me of Anasazi pottery and so I stitched a few zig zag designs.

The larger one reminds me more of an amphora. Both of the vessels were felted over a flat pattern, and then once they were semi-felted, I threw them into my front loading washing machine. The small blue one, I checked frequently. It came out lovely and puffy. The larger one was forgotten in the chaos of the day and came out with a bit of a ridge where it had flattened out. I turned it inside out and put it through again and another ridge appeared. Sigh. Maybe not the best idea I ever had. I wanted to do some netting on it too but the waxed linen seemed too fine. While looking for something else in the shed, I discovered the bag of fiber that had been gifted to me. I decided to spin some of the jute to use with the larger vessel.



I have not spun anything like this before. The fibers are long and strong and every now and then I come across a clump of.... something. Not the easiest thing that I have ever spun, nor the tidiest. The stuff sheds like crazy and there are bits of fiber everywhere. It is something to be spun outside in the summer time. Unfortunately, it is spring and flood season and tomorrow I will update you with what effect today's rain has had.

In any case, Nicole came by and looked at the yarn that I was spinning and said "that scares me!" And she said it more than once. So here is the first bobbin of my hairy scary yarn that will be used for knotless netting on my large amphora like vessel.

And in roving form......

Here it is up close. I suppose that I should be spinning it wet, but I actually like the hairy part.

Tomorrow, I am back at work. It may prove to be an interesting day. The waters have risen quite a bit and with the rain that we had today the flood forecast is expected to reach the same level of the 2005 flood. Over 500 homes affected that year. And depending on the rainfall in the next couple of days, we may reach the same levels as the "Flood of '73" Here are a few images from the past few record floods. Most notably 1936 and 1973.

Next in the queue

Here are two of the scarves that I completed during that time. There is one more scarf (still unfringed) and my next warp that I also completed that week that are in a display case at the school. I put them in there along with some undyed fleece and some dyed, but unspun fleece. The idea was to show the creation of my scarves in their various stages.


After spinning slubby and fat for a week during my residency, I have the need to spin something finer.
And that is were "Sailors Delight" comes in. Once again, I will say that it is the finest that I have spun yet, and once again it is true. I have had my bundles of fleece in a fabric bag and the last couple of bundles that I have spun, I have found have become somewhat felted on the outside. I am wondering if it is from being jostled around in the bag or from being fondled by various people. Anyone have any ideas? Or how I can stop it from getting felted. I once read or heard that keeping fleece in plastic bags can contribute to felting. What is your personal experience? Thanks.

When I am an old woman....

I shall wear hats!

Hats with feathers and fringes!

Hats with flowers and tassels!

Hats with fish and tentacles!

Tall hats that match hand spun, hand woven scarves!


When I am an old lady, I shall wear hats!

BusyBusyBusy

I have been working overtime trying to get a few things ready for the faculty show. The deadline has been extended one day and everything was due first thing this morning. I'd show you some pictures, but they are at home. I am at work right now waiting for some slides to scan so that I can digitize and label them. There are a lot of slides to get through and each one takes about two minutes to scan. So I have a bit of down time occasionally when there is not too much information on the slide to record.

Enter....The Socks. I'm working on an i-mac with a built in camera.
I used to sit and twiddle my thumbs occasionally for about 30 seconds between slides and it became old pretty quickly. So I decided to bring my knitting in and this is the progress that I have made in 30 second intervals between more than 300 slides. For the first time, I am knitting both sock at the same time to avoid the dreaded Second Sock Syndrome. You can see the humble beginnings of sock #2 hanging off of the needles of it's larger sister. So far so good. I have about a gazillion more slides to get through so I may finish the pair before the end of the year, which here occurs sometime in May. I doubt that I will get all of the slides done though.

But getting back to the reason that I have been absent from here for so long.... I have a felted wall piece, a dyed silk shawl, and a hand spun scarf. I had originally wanted to make a series of scarves with the hand spun but the second one I had a few tension issues. I decided to pair my hand spun with some mohair/silk blend that I dyed to match, and the mohair has no stretch to it what so ever where as the hand spun could be stretched about twice it's length. Some yarns just stretch more than others (as all of you knitters and weavers know) But when they are on a loom together, all of the yarns have to be under tension. I tried to compensate when I wound on and tied on, but apparently not enough. The finished scarf looks sort of a little like seersucker. Not what I was going for. So, to make a long story short, I have to do a bit more experimentation. I didn't feel that that scarf was something that I could show as my "best work", beautiful though it was.
I have also have a cold that has been keeping me awake at nights even though I am dog tired when I go to bed. Maybe I should just get up and blog!

Thanks for stopping by and I promise that I won't wait so long to wright again.

More Felt: ethnographic samples

Why "ethnographic samples"? I really have no idea. That is what Denise called them. It was apparently what her teacher called them.
What they are is a way to show different felting techniques. We started with the research of a symbol. I started with spiders, the goose, and the hand. I settled on the hand because it is a form that I have been exploring since high school. As a crafts person, where would I be without my hands? I use them everyday and try to be aware of how valuable a tool they are. Hand symbols are in many places in our every day life. They have been used in textiles and in art and crafts for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years.
What were suppose to end up with was 4 samples of different techniques that were the same size and shape.



First is felt on felt. The hand was cut out of a piece of soft felt that I made and then laid on a felt bat which was then wet down and felted. The hand was Nicole's little hand.



Next is felting on a secondary structure. In this case, black polyester sheer material. You lay the fleece on the fabric and felt until your arms feel like they are going to fall off, and then you felt some more. The symbol is a healers hand. This is one of the old symbols.



Next is cut work. When you initially lay out the bat, you use different colours for the different layers. I used a red/orange for my bottom layer, burgundy for my middle layer and purple for my top layer. When it is all dry, you carefully snip through the felt layers to reveal the colours beneath. Amber, my class mate, used many more colours and I liked her results better.



Applique was next. For this I took one of my sketches "for a walk". "Take it for a walk" is what my first year 3D teacher, Peter, used to say all the time. I hated it at the time, but now I see the value in being able to push an idea beyond its humble beginnings. Thanks Peter. For this it was a simple cut out an image and sew it onto another piece of felt.



And last is the mosaic that is (to my mind) unresolved. I ran out of the blue felt and I need to make another piece. I though that if I mosaiced the border, it would fit will with the piece, but alas, it did not. Because I had my required 4 samples, I didn't feel the need to complete this last one in time for assessment. I will finish it at my leisure. No. Really. I will.
You in the back. Stop that snickering.