Our
fascination for this fantastic craft started a few years ago when A made a
wonderful felt pot at school. Never
having tried wet felting, I was determined to have a go too but it took another
of A’s school sessions, that resulted in a wonderful Mother’s Day present of a
felted keyring, before I got around to buying the wool tops to ‘have a
go’. Unfortunately my interest that time
was short lived as I just couldn’t get the felt to go right and instead of
persevering I stupidly gave up.
My
interest was revived this Christmas, however, by the gift of the most wonderful
‘Gillian Gladrag Bonbon Batatelle’ necklace kit. The colours of the wool tops were amazing,
the instructions clear and concise and after covering myself and half my
kitchen surfaces with soap suds, managed to ‘master the art’ enough to produce
a credible reproduction of the beads in the photograph on the packet! I was very pleased with myself for having
produced something that I am proud to wear.
When
A came home from Uni for “Reading” week (and I use the quotation marks
advisedly!) we decided on a trip up the A24 to Dorking to Gillian Gladrag’s
marvellous ‘Fluffatorium’. Oh my
goodness, what a wonderful shop this is, definitely a ‘must’ to visit if you
are ever in Dorking. A and I spent a
very happy time wandering through the kaleidoscope of colours, knitting wool,
buttons, knitting needles, wool tops, kits, crafting accessories, deciding what
to buy. I bought the brilliant ‘Carnivalof Felting’ book and some wool tops and A invested in another of the felting
kits, for herself this time, the ‘Anemone-Ome’ flower brooch kit. (The results of which can be found here)
Back
home after a restorative coffee in Dorking’s Costa, A set about making her
‘Anemone’ (one thing about wet felting is that it does smell wonderful!) and I
started layering up my wool tops to make ‘Simple Flat Felt’ following the
instructions in ‘Carnival of Felting’.
Simple and fun to do, roughly an hour or so later, damp and sudsy with
slightly prune-like hands, I had a
credible rectangle of damp, black spotty felt drying naturally on the
table. Success!
Now
what to do with it?? The amount of felt
I had managed to make was limited by the size of the bamboo mat I had used but
it turned out to be about 9” x 11” by
the time it had completely done all its shrinking, plenty to make a
pencil/make-up/scissors etc case. Once
it had completely dried, I found some pretty lining fabric, bought a black zip
and set about transforming my felt into something useable. Despite the best efforts of my beloved sewing
machine (which was having a fitful day), I managed to make the lining and fit
the zip (after a fashion) and now have a pencil/make-up/scissors case I can be
proud of (just don’t look too closely at the zip fitting!)
