Thursday, September 1, 2011

Nuno scarf inovations

I headed back out to the shop yesterday. I haven't done enough sweating this week. I'm bound and determined to perfect the lazy woman's nuno felting technique. When I first heard how it was done (put you fiber on your fabric and roll it all up. roll it back and forth 200 time) I thought: "I am so not standing here all day rolling a scarf back and forth".
Well with the building of the felting machine, I don't have to! I just make my roll, put it in the machine and go away to do something far more interesting.
This works well for the felt sheets, but I found that my nuno scarves seemed kind of, well, flat. Nuno is supposed to be textured. So I went back to the directions. (this is fairly unusual for me, maybe it's my defy authority youth, or the fact that I am one of the laziest people on earth, but I just don't tend to read/follow instructions). What I learned is there is another step. Apparently you are suppose to physically abuse your work by throwing it at something for upwards to 20 minutes.

.....??? (see lazy comment, so not gonna happen.)

This sent me in search of something to do my tossing for me. Enter my drier. Thirty minutes on air fluff with one of Molly's tennis balls whacking the heck out of my scarves and viola! Nuno scarves!






staying busy and waiting for cooler weather

Hot , hot, hot! Buster what's-his-name may like to sing about it, but out we're quite thurghouly sick of it. The weather forecasters have started to plead publicly for people to stop sending them hate mail. I feel bad for them, though I admit to calling them a few rude names after hearing the latest forecast. I have notice that as of last night, they stopped pretending that cool weather was around the corner and just have it at 110 degrees all week long.

At least for us there is some relief through the night. Temps up in town where they have all that asphalt and concrete will only cool down to around 90 degrees while we'll get down into the mid 70's. Small comfort while I'm out in the shop hearing the automatic vent fan kick on at 10 a.m. and knowing it's set to turn on a t 120 degrees.

That hasn't kept me out of the shop. I've been busy working with the felter and am pleased to see my felt sheets getting more and more consistent. Now Jim, Dot and I have been working on making flowers out of all that felt. We're having fun, though I doubt what we are creating would ever be found in nature.
I laid a bunch of the sheets out on my kitchen table to get a picture of them. Silly me I left them sitting there and walked away to do something else. When I returned I found Frosty happily kneading the sheets and making herself a nest. Never mind that she was sitting on my kitchen table, she was messing up my felt!















I also tried some more nuno felting.

The scarf didn't turn out quite the way I was expecting, my projects seldom do, but I liked it. It was interesting to see how the silk textured after the felting was done. I'll have to do some more playing with this.













I've also been making more coil baskets. I have some novelty acrylic yarn that I've been using up. I had the ball sitting on the floor next to me while I worked on the basket. When I reached down for another length of yarn, I found my ball missing. Looking around, I found the culprit. Daisy was feeling playful and was happily chewing up the ball of yarn. I took me fifteen minutes to get it away from her. .

Her legs may be short but she can move them really, really fast. There is a reason Brian nick named her the carper torpedo!