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Felting Felting is fun! Good messy fun! Felt is created when you subject natural fibres to stress and the fibres cling together to create a fabric. Lightweight felted scarves are a great accessory – warm, colourful. These are made from fine merino and silk, also pure merino, and blends of merino with alpaca, linen and other fibres.They come in a great variety of colour blends. These lovely pieces are wonderfully warm, lightweight and durable. Felting can also incorporate others fibres, yarns and fabrics to embellish, decorate and strengthen. Felting which uses a fine silk fabric base is called nuno felting and creates wonderfully light, floating fabrics. Nuno felted scarves are paricularly beautiful examples of this type of felting. Heavy felting using numerous layers of fibre is the means of creating felted hats, bags, slippers and oethr hard wearing accessories. This type of felt is inherently water repellent (to a degree) and extraordinarily hard wearing. Felted hats and other items will be listed when available. Click here if you would like to see more felted articles. Some felted hats I have created If you would like to explore felting for yourself, a couple of felting workshops are available, or you can request a custom workshop for yourself. Click here to go to workshops page.
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Wearable Art (Garments)
These are garments created usually using a combination of techniques including felting, weaving, silk painting, fabric printing, appliqué, machine embroidery, to name a few. Each item is a one-off unique piece, never to be repeated.
One of my stand-by designs is my version of the Lord of the Rings cloak. These beautiful garments were inspired by the cloaks worn by the hobbits and their friends in the Lord of the Rings. I found some designs, made a prototype, then decided that I needed to adapt the design to make the cloak more comfortable, more fitting and so that it "flowed" more when the person wearing it moved around. The cloak starts as undyed yarn. I dye the yarn for each cloak, in the colour combinations I have chosen. This is then warped onto my huge eight shaft loom and I weave the leafy shadow pattern to create 5.5 metres of cloth. I also incorporate a decorative border into the weave. The piece then comes off the loom and is fulled (this means made infot a firmer stronger fabric by washing and manipulating and then pressing damp into a roll to firm the fabric). Then the design is cut from the fabric, as is the silk lining. The silk is stitched into sahpe, then dyed as a piece to match the colours of the weave. The wool is sewn together and the lining attached. The cloak is finished off by choosing an appropriate antique brooch to use to clasp the neck front together. The making of each cloak take several months, interspersed between my other creative activities. So each is a true labour of love, never to be replicated.
My Elements Cloak is a piece made from eight panels. The outer shell features alternating panels of shibori dyed silk and cobweb felt. The panels are coloured to represent the four elements - earth, air, fire and water, one of each for each medium. The lining is made of eight matching silk panels, again dyed to represent the four elements. The whole garment has been embellished with machine embroidery and features a pair of double corded clasps. The cloak is light, airy, flowing and quite spectacular.
I also create various silk garments which have been dyed or painted, so that the garment itself becomes an art piece.
These unique items will be listed when they are available.
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| Lord of the Rings Cloak | Elements cape | |
Click here if you would like to see more wearable art/garments.