My mother-in-law gave me a needle felting kit for Christmas, along with some supplemental fleece. I had long admired needle felting but expected my reaction to wool would be even worse if the wool was in loose form and there were pointy implements involved – but this fleece was from llamas!
I was nervous about diving right into the loose fibers, though, and after looking at some projects online I thought I’d try needle felting with acrylic felt, the sort that comes in sheets. It works pretty well, although I expect the fleece will be easier to work with, in part because the fibers are longer.
Here’s my first try:
Here’s the second:
Here’s the third:
For that third one, I felted the orange squiggle down from the top, and then the hot pink backing up from the bottom. That gave it its hot pink hairs.
Earlier this week I went to White River Yarns for a needle felting pen, with three needles. This was partly so I can work a bit faster when I start on the actual fleece, and partly because I’m pretty sure the acrylic felt is ruining the original two needles.
It’s ruining the original backing material also, because I have to stab really hard!
As a final acrylic try before moving on to llama fleece, I wanted to try to make something three-dimensional. I started with a square that I rolled into a cone, and it reminded me of the paper that’s rolled around bouquets. I thought I could make my husband a bouquet – he brings me quite a few – so with a long thin strip I rolled a rose. That was enough to fill the tissue paper by itself, so I felted it into place and left it on Matt’s place at the dining table.
I acquired a strange obsession with Mod Podge after a friend brought some over the night we made pie charts, when I used it to make the candy wrapper collage shown on my About page. I also went through a long phase of saving all the wine, beer, and other alcohol labels I could, going to lengths to soak and scrape them off the bottles. I have long since stopped that, as it is far more laborious than it is worth to me, but I had an envelope of labels and finally (years after the pie chart night) purchased my own Mod Podge.
Also in my possession was a wooden box with grapevines on it.
So what is one to do but decoupage wine labels all over the interior and foot of the box?
I learned that Mod Podge is not the best glue, though it is an adequate glue. I kind of wish I’d glued the labels down with rubber cement originally and used the Mod Podge only as a finisher, but it worked out. I used many, many layers of Mod Podge. The oval label in the middle of the interior bottom had a ridge around the edge where it was poking up, and my efforts to sand that down led to the entire coating on the oval label peeling off! Fortunately, it only peeled off exactly over the oval, which meant further layers of Mod Podge helped smooth the surface – there was still a buildup of Podge outside the oval, so the ridge was diminished. I did, however, add a label from the neck of a vodka bottle to cover where I’d sanded off the oval label’s color.
All in all, I would call this a fun and incredibly easy project, though it takes a lot of time. Not at once, but spaced out over a number of days. I used a foam brush and wrapped it in aluminum foil between uses, though I still had to replace it once or twice over the life of the project when it got gummy.
In honor of my sister’s birthday, my first video post! I mean, the post is a post, but there’s a video at the end. Visit Kate’s blog for book reviews, art, and miscellany. Happy birthday, baby sister!
I have been experimenting more with soapmaking. I got a gift card for Jo-Ann Fabrics from my grandmother for Christmas, and I went to their (horrible) website and (with a great deal of pain and effort) ordered some clear glycerin soap and a soap mold. I already had some purple glycerin soap I’d bought at a winery, which was supposed to be wine scented but is really artificial grape flavoring scented.
I had the brilliant idea that I would mix some non-glycerin soap with the clear glycerin to slightly tint and scent it, and after a little spree at TJMaxx, came away with some acai scented soap, which complemented the grape scent well. There was one problem: grossly different melting points. I was microwaving the glycerin, which works great, but the non-glycerin does not melt at temperatures the glycerin can reach without scorching. I did a lot of whisking, which introduced some foam but did not succeed in fully incorporating the soap bits. The foam rose to the top of the soap molds, which actually produced an interesting effect. I poured a bit, embedded some shapes that were half grape soap and half plain glycerin, and poured some more.
The first picture above is the top when the soap was in the mold, and the second is the bottom. You can see the embedded shape trapped some of the foam/soap bits, and the rest rose to the top. The bat soap is one of the two for which I had to melt some additional glycerin, which is why it is not completely covered in foam. I like that effect, actually. It’s kind of like the bat is flying through fog, or you’re seeing it in the clouds.
To make the shapes, incidentally, I sliced the soaps with a wire cheese slicer and then cut with cookie cutters.
That first run made four soaps, a triceratops soap that turned out like the bat soap and now resides at my boyfriend’s apartment, and a heart soap that didn’t unmold that well and was melted down for round 2: the foamination.
I thought it would be cool to intentionally get the foamy effect of the first set of soaps, and so I combined glycerin and non-glycerin soap with some water, put it in the top of a double boiler, added salt to the bottom of the double boiler so it would boil hotter, and whisked thoroughly. It didn’t get completely smooth, but it got very thick and foamy.
These came out quite soft and I was not convinced they would hold up to use without crumbling. I wrapped them in paper towels for a few days to try to dry them out a bit before testing the two square soaps with handwashing. Verdict? Unsurprisingly, the foamy soap produced better lather. It also held up solidly, though it kind of looks like it has the mange. The square is slightly large for my hands’ comfort, but fine (I might prefer a smaller footprint with a thicker soap). I’ll keep using them and see what happens when I reach the embedded shapes.
Clean-up was in two rounds, and round two contained a surprise. It’s not exactly vulcanization of rubber, but it was a happy accident. See for yourself (and don’t mind how subdued I sound in this video):
