Passion flower

I have been busy making a Passion flower. Have been wanting to make one ever since I got the book Felting fabulous flowers by Gillian Harris. I have made a few of the projects from this small book which has lots of information on techniques and step by step flower projects. I got mine on Amazon uk, link below.

Felting Fabulous Flowers

It’s an awesome book and I have gone back to it many times in the two years I have had it. The only problem for me is I use acrylic fibre which doesn’t wet felt. The book is a mixture of wet and needle felt so I adapt where I need to.

I made my prefelt by needlefelting. In the book wool is used so she makes prefelt by wetfelting, I can’t do this with acrylic fibre so I set up an audio book and just stab away at my felting mat which is covered in fibres. I made extra so I could make stamens by cutting them 2mm thick from a rectangle of felt. 

Two problems occurred. 

Firstly upon ironing the petals I had cut out from the prefelt they became too flimsy and see through. I decided to attach them to another layer for structure and strength. This gave me more work to do but was worth it as the petals are now pleasingly substantial. 

                           Two layers of prefelt needled together.

The second problem was the stamens. When cut they became very delicate and broke in places. As you cannot just roll damp soapy acrylic fibres in your hands I had to find a new way to make a long strong stamen.

I decided to use a method I have used before to create lengths of fibre. This involves wrapping fibre around a long thin bbq skewer and stabbing around the skewer carefully to join the fibres together( be careful not to break your needle on the wood). When it’s felted push it off the skewer. You will be able to stretch it slightly to get a thinner rope. I then dipped the whole length in starch and left to dry. 

I joined the two sets of petals by adding more fibre in the centre . I then cut up the stamens to 4mm and coloured them with blue and purple sharpie pens. I then felted the stamens around the centre. On top of this I felted a green circle with an aubergine ring.  

I then followed instructions to make the five and three pronged stamens, these were glued in place. A few touch ups where the purple hadn’t taken and done. 

Vegan needle felting 3

It’s been all about the vegan needle felted flowers recently, It started with making a sunflower 🌻 which took forever as there were so many individual petals. I then ironed them (tentively as I thought the acrylic fibre might melt) It didn’t ,it just turned into a flatter denser felt...result!! The middle was a massive pile of fibres which I felted down so it was smooth but still spongy. I then made another one with different tones of yellow in it.

The next flower was a poppy where I also ironed the petals this made them lovely and flat and dense, usually acrylic fibre is kind of fuzzy like stuffing Trouble is ironing the felt made it difficult to give it any shape so I made a cup of fibre underneath to give me something to push against whilst shaping the petals. I made the poppy with 5 petals underneath and 4 on top, few more than a real poppy but looks lusher. I used eyelash yarn to make the stamen’s which I hand sewed onto the centre of the flower.

The next flower was an experiment mixing colours on the petals to give an ombré effect

Today I finished making a multicoloured Zinnia, so many petals! Was worried it would be too flat if ironed the petals so this flower shows how “pouffy” the acrylic fibre is. Some of the colours I mixed myself using two dog slicker brushes to comb two colours together. Pretty pleased how the colours turned out.  

  

Vegan needle felting 2

Hi it's been a long time since I posted. And I've been busy needle felting. Not with bamboo fibres which make hard mean 3D items but with a new fibre called Aclaine from Japan. A company called Hamanaka is producing the 100% acrylics fibre for felting which means it is vegan!!!
http://hamanaka-jp-crafts.com/items/feltwool/aclaine.html

I get mine from an etsy shop called SweetPeaDolls, they are super helpful, they are what's called Embassadors for Aclaine fibre which basically means they sell it in England.

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/SweetPeaDolls?ref=l2-shop-header-avatar
It comes in a wide range of colours, mainly pretty pastels and fresh bright colours. It felts really well to itself and makes delightfully spongy soft items. It is not so good for thin detail such as stems as the fibres seem short and it retains a lot of air not unlike wadding. I am currently experimenting with it to see what it can do and have made a few flowers, a hamster and some bird brooches.

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The roses were made by creating a sheet of felt first by laying it over a sponge and needling it with the clover 5 needle tool, when doing this it is important to lift the felt frequently so it doesn't stick to the foam. This sheet was then cut into two base pieces per flower and a wavy long strip which I coiled and attached from the middle outwards. This technique came from a lovely new book called Felting fabulous flowers which I got from Amazon. The pansys were also from this book.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1909397393/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Vegan felting

One of the things that stopped me going fully vegan was my love of needle felting. I was very sad about the idea that I would never play with fibres and colour combined again but didn't want to be a hypocrite. Enter the wonderful internet!!! I found out from google searching that you can felt with plant and synthetic fibres!!!! I had always thought that this wasn't possible if the fibres weren't some kind of wool.

I have the post by mythillogical of the myths and fabrications blog http://mythillogical.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/bamboozledexperiments-in-bamboo-fibre.html to thank for pointing me in the direction of world of wool world of wool website who seem to be the only company selling ready dyed bamboo,most company's sell it white,it felts when needle felted,I cannot vouch for wet felting as I don't do it. It is a different texture to wool,shinier and slippery and slightly harder to get to felt,it doesn't seem to mesh quite as well as wool fibres but still felts,I find it best to rough it up a little first by carding it between my dog brush carders!!!

This also makes it possible to mix colours together,the colours from world of wool are quite bright so if you like a more subtle palette mixing is the way to go. I have been experimenting with mixing mid tones to my main colours and got some beautiful orangey pinky colours. 

My next test would be to use the fibres in a design. I drew out a mandala pattern and then hit a snag.....how to transfer the design to felt? You can't draw on felt to mark where you want the lines of your design...so I decided to stitch the areas of the design in running stitch and hopefully be able to pull them out later.

I then started filling in the colours and was pleasantly surprised how well they took to the background felt.in some places the background felt was starting to warp a little so I kept it in the embroidery frame for stability.i used my Janome Embellisher to smooth out the fibres but didn't linger to long in one spot as I am aware that the acrylic prefelt background is not that robust.

Very happy with the results so far and extremely happy to be needle felting with totally vegan fibres!!!i am embroidering gold lures thread around the coloured areas,this is how far I've got at the moment.

Guess what just got delivered? More felty goodness from world of wool,black and white bamboo so I can mix tones as well as colour and an interesting fibre called super right trilobal nylon rainbow top. It's much harder to felt and makes a fluffy mess everywhere but is so shiny and sparkly,I think it will make lovely highlights to a felted piece.

It's the rectangular sample at the bottom. Am excited about all these new fibres and am off to mix some new colours.