Make-along Day 1

So you know how I said I was going to make a shirt for J?

Didn't happen.

After a not so pleasant morning, and as I was planning my measurements J bluntly informed me that since I wouldn't be working with a stretchy fabric I would have to either make the shirt with buttons or a zipper. (I had a project fail a year ago and blamed it on the stretchy fabric, and have refused to work with a similarly stretchy fabric to this day. I'm still not sure if it was the fabric or my nearly non-existent sewing skills, but it made me feel better to blame it on the fabric.)

I've never sewn button holes in fabric, and I certainly did not have fun the last time I sewed a zipper on something. So, after a not so great morning, all I needed was the feeling of being overwhelmed and the sense of impending failure to make me throw in the towel.

So instead I felted my first nuno scarf.

Iused some of the linen fabric that was to be made into the shirt (there's still enough for the shirt, I think, when (not if) I do actually make it).

The first thing I did was watch an excellent video on nuno felting on feltinglessons.com.

Then I layed down a long piece of bubble wrap (it couldn't all fit on my short counter space), and then saran wrap. I put down some red and blue wool, then two thin layers of green wool, and then bits of yarn. I couldn't fit the whole scarf on my counter space, so I just layed down wool for the length of my counter space.


I put some of the fabric on top, and two layers of green wool, yarn, and bits of red and blue wool. Since I didn't hem the sides I made sure that there was wool wrapped around the sides.



I put the nylon netting on top of the wool and fabric that I just completed, wet it with cold water and smoothed it down, then rolled it around a rolling pin until I hit the next chunk of blank fabric. I applied wool, etc. to that next length of fabric, and repeated until all the fabric was covered.

Then I tied it and rolled it back and forth until my arms were tired. I took a long break.



When I went back to the package it didn't seem like it had felted very much, with a lot of the fibers sticking to the nylon and not to the linen. So I spent a long time manually rubbing it with a bit of bubble wrap. When I could see signs of felting I wrapped it in the bubble wrap again, and started rolling it until I was sick of the monotony.

Even though it seemed like the wool hadn't felted completely to the linen I decided to walk on the wild side and started felting it with warm water. Eventually, when I was once again sick of the monotony I wrapped it lengthwise in the nylon mesh, put it in some pantyhose, and threw it in the washing machine (on a quick cycle).

The result: