Felt,Stitch and Embellish fibres

I had promised to write this up last year for those who live too far away to come to a live class.

There are many ways to achieve the imagery but for now we will start with a scanner and a variety of household items /photos etc

here we look at scanned images of garden tools and a piece of metallic organza nuno felt

these were just placed on the scanner bed lid down and press go.

here we have a daisy picture paper clips and a piece of hessian again lid down press go

now let us use things from the garden plus the picture again

now we start placing the objects on differing coloured sheet bases and altering the scanner settings –always write this down and the original setting.

here the wooden objects all have differing settings and some are scanned over black silk

textiles now come into play and you can see how the image can be altered so easily these all have differing silks layered under or over to give differing shadows

Hard objects from around the home sieve fork shaver head etc over crunched blue velvet silk

allium head added in and settings lowered and pink silk used –love these shadows

let us now think of interesting visual textures we want to see in our felt–these crunched up geranium leaves will look great on nuno and then hand stitched

black organza on top oyster silk beneath

I wear glasses and have always done so even before I ever needed them just loved them so here we have a few pairs scanned for further imagery

I have now taken some of those scanned images and alterd the outline shape in my software on the computer ie a heart full of roses

a page of scans in my sketchbook

a page in my book getting ready for an exhibition of work based on ‘being woman’

This outline feminine form contains me in all the years all scanned in

Now all you need to do is play and experiment there are no hard and fast rules print your scans out index them with the settings and then take a photo of the image if you choose.

When you have a collection that sits together and makes sense to you you are ready to take these into print form.

Prepared cloths are available but they are expensive and I prefer to prepare my own cloth for printing.

We will use silk organza or silk chiffon as this is good for nuno. A coloured INKJET PRINTER is what you need and remember the inks in the printer are water soluble so as soon as you begin felting with the silk the print will wick and destroy the image unless you prepare the cloth first.

I use Bubblejet in a cat litter tray lay my cut pieces of silk —cut to A4 for my printer.

Soak overnight then dry with a hair dryer or on the line in the wind.

You will then fix this piece of silk to a carrier to take it through the printer.

I use Freezer paper and simply iron the silk to the precut paper.

Load carefully into printer and press go.Let the silk dry then iron and then store these ready for your felting work. I tend to use these in reverse nuno rubbing the fibres rather then the silk.

A beautiful background image photographed then printed out using this method can be used very well in your work adding fibres onto this.

Photography altered then printed onto silks for nuno

Use your beautiful imagery that you capture and digitally adapt it on the computer before printing as described above

do not just use it like this play about and get something a little different

you can see the outlines here merged over each other and then printed onto silk chiffon prior to nuno felting this fabric did look beautiful on completion . On these samples you can see the adjustments I used using Photoshop Elements

Another garden shot

merged watered down imagery which when placed on silk then used in nuno gives you this lovely faded ‘old english’ fabric look.Play about with your imagery don’t waste it.

The next thing we will look at is dyeing your cloth then using disharge paste we make our negative design which when felted reverts to positive