How to: Heart Felt Soaps...

Lovely Lady Leanne from Feel At Home brought me over some of her New Zealand olive & avocado oil handmade soaps (with sea salt and infused with essential oils of sweet fennel & Roman chamomile) to felt.

So I thought I would document the process as I notice I haven't blogged about anything for a year or so, which is very slack of me...

1. Choose your soap and some colourful wool roving (merino felts nice and easily).

2. Using a block of foam & felting needles, very lightly needle felt some wool into squares large enough to wrap around the bar of soap.  Two thin layers of wool works well - one ontop of the other, fibers lying in perpendicular directions.

3. Wrap the square of lightly felted wool around the soap and wet it, so that all the fibers are dampened, using the hottest water you can stand (rubber gloves will help)!

4. Using a thin sheet of plastic (eg. cut up shopping bag) - wrap this around the hot, wet, woolly soap so that it makes a parcel.  Then rub this parcel on all sides ontop a bamboo mat or non-slip piece of plastic mat. The roughness makes the warm, wet wool fibers felt together when rubbed.

5. When the wool has started to felt together and feels a little secure around the bar of soap, take it out of the plastic wrapping, get it nice and damp again with really hot water and then get back to rubbing it directly on the uneven surface.  Keep this up for around 15 mins until the wool has completely felted on all sides and fits snuggly around the bar of soap.

5. Rinse off the excess soapy suds under the cold tap and leave to dry on a wire cake wrack. First layer is done!

6. After a few days, when the outer layer is dry, but the soap is still a little moist underneath, it is time to needle felt some designs onto the base layer.  I use a size 38 felting needle.  Careful with your fingers or you will leave blood marks on the felt....

7. Finished!

 

Sunrise Oolite and a Woolly Jumper

Gosh - sorry (Queen Grand Purl Baa) I've been so very awol!  This absence will probably continue for a while until I get the sack from my 'proper' job.

I've just had this little woolly brooch returned to me from an exhibition in Waiheke Island - it features a piece of one of my favourite gemgrade fossils called 'Oolite' from the fantastic Heart Of Stone Studio (its such a satisfying word to say).

Oolite describes a sedimentary rock formed with ooids (meaning "egglike") - spherical grains in concentric layers.  This oolite comes from Wyoming and is multicoloured with pink and gold spots of fossil.
Other materials used: Faux bone, sterling silver, merino wool (needle felted), base metal washers and microscrews, Thai Karen Hill Tribes fine silver beads (purchased Fair Trade), copper backplate, small beads and a brooch & pendant clasp.
Length: 7.5cm (about 3 inches)
Width: 6cm (about 2 1/2 inches)

I have mainly been knitting recently - it has been very cold and rainy here in NZ and so this happened...

Useful for keeping warm and doing bank jobs.
The thick/thin 'meltwater' wool I bought on sale from the yummy online NZ yarn shop called YarnTraders - run by the lovely Helen who stocks exotic and unusual yarns, fibres, felt and fabrics.

I'm hoping spring/summer will be here soon so the evenings are lighter and I can get more 'creative' stuff done instead of wanting to curl up under my duvet and block my ears to the sound of the constant rain. I can't believe it rains more here in NZ than it does in the UK - how is that possible?

Pink Optic Fiber Turquoise Brooch Pin with Felt & Crochet.....

Apologies. My 9-5 Mon-Fri office job seems to be getting in the way of things and all I want to do in my spare evening time is knit!  Knitting is my latest addiction. But it is fabulous to have some cash coming in on a regular basis and some warm woollies......

I finally got around to finishing this piece which incorporates optic fibers with a pink LED. The LED is hidden inside the felt on the back and is powered by a small, flat  3V coin battery.

The beautiful, multicolored piece of turquoise (purchased from Heart Of Stone Studios) (size 42.5mm x 33.5mm) comes from right over the Tibetan border in China. It is the same source of turquoise that the Tibetans have used and worn for centuries.

I have also used oxidised copper, UV resin, vintage shards of pink glass, brass eyelets, merino wool (needle felted), beads, crochet thread, conductive thread, bamboo, bone & craft wire.

About 10cm long by 8cm wide.

Bruneau Jasper Squid display

I've finally got around to updating my Bruneau Jasper Squid piece, which I had been meaning to do for sometime, but now with a 9-5 Mon-Fri office job I have had to slow down a bit on my creative urges (unless this includes creative accountancy?).

I wanted him to be able to be displayed on the wall as a picture when not being worn and so came up with this....

He sits on a canvas covered with felted merino wool, etched sterling silver fish and beads sewn on. He simply sits on three nails hammered into the wooden canvas frame (covered with Thai Hill Tribes fine silver etched heishi - purchased Fair Trade).

The Squid body features a gorgeous polished Bruneau Canyon nodule from Idaho, near Mount Home (USA).  This material is no longer available for collecting as the government is making a bird sanctuary out of the canyon.  This is the King of the orbicular jaspers. Purchased (as usual) from one of my favourite stone suppliers, the Heart Of Stone Studio in the USA.

This piece also includes a vintage (1940s) 'blinking' dolls eye, bronze (etched and patina and mica powders applied), Faux bone, brass micro-screws, sterling silver oxidised wire, Thai Karen Hills Tibes tiny beads (fine silver and vermeil - Fair Trade), natural freshwater pearls in white and pink, natural pink spinel gemstones, merino wool (wet felted and needle felted), sterling silver caps (for the 'tentacles') and UV resin.

Length of Squid - about 29cm.

Variscite Sucker Brooch

I'm finally happy that this little 'sucker' is finished!

The circles, dots and spots remind me of octopus tentacles - hence the name.

The gemstone featured in this is Variscite in shades of soft seafoam green from one of my favourite suppliers Heart Of Stone Studio (in the USA). This artistic bit of rock is from Australia and is very unusual in that it has the Variscite running like a river through interesting shades of matrix.

Other materials used (all cold connections):

copper (patina using liver of sulphur and then with prismacolor and gloss on top);

pearls stitched through holes in the copper - in light pink, cream and chocolate brown;

merino wool in shades of purple, mauve & turquoise (needle felted);

beads and thread.

There is a brooch pin stitched to the back.
Approx size: 7cm x 8cm / 2.75 inches x 3 inches

She is headed off to be judged for the Regal Castings Contemporary Jewellery Awards, which is part of the New Zealand Jewellery Show.  This will be held at SkyCity, Auckland on 1-4 July 2010. So fingers crossed!

Ginga Alpaca Yarn Dreads...

Been having quite alot of fun with my kiddies and a bag of locally grown ginga alapaca.

First I spun the alpaca on my Majacraft Pioneer with some green & orange locks, pieces of sari scarf and turquoise sari silk (as modelled below).  The sari silks I bought from YarnTraders here in New Zealand - a great online resource for exotic and unusual yarns, fibers, felt and fabrics.

It was made a little trickier as the ginga alapaca (kindly and lovingly carded by Sharon at Jumbuck Carding) had been sitting squished in the bottom of my cupboard for a few months and was all matted together.

I think I am going to keep hold of this ginga yarn in case I want to wear it to a party (not that I ever go out these days unless its before 7pm) or I may knit it into a Ginga Hat.

By the way, the lack of Lanolin in alpaca fiber (such as is often found in yarn made from sheep’s wool) also makes natural alpaca yarn hypoallergenic in nature or very unlikely to cause any allergic reactions.

Knitting Handspun Frenzy.....

I'm in a bit of a knitting frenzy at the moment, which has been great for using up some of my handspun yarns. I can now nearly shut my cupboard!

Some of my better knits go to The Little Gallery Of Fine Arts in Tairua and these ones are all headed there. Its a fabulous tourist destination on the Coromandel run by the talented artist Paula McNeill.

The Coromandel is one of New Zealand's favourite tourist destinations - you can even dig your own hot water spa pool in the sand at Hot Water Beach.

The above is a crochet scarf - I love crochet as its difficult to drop a stitch by mistake as there is only one on the crochet hook anyway! The gorgeous commercial green heather merino wool is Cascade Magnum in Moss colour (100% Peruvian Highland Wool). Its 2 stitches per inch - love it! Nice and quick!