I am in love with Nuno!

I took a nuno-felting workshop this weekend with Swedish felt artist Yvonne Bävman and I may never get my hands out of the soapy water. Her exhibits are mostly needle felted but this weekend was a playful excursion into Nuno.
We made scarves, table runners and handwarmers. We played with silks, cottons and merino in all forms.

Here are some pieces I made inspired by Valentine's Day. A set of handwarmers and a felt heart.




These handwarmers are apparently all the rage in Denmark! They are made of dyed Merino top layered with snippets of silk and lace with more wool on top. They are felted 'in the round' so they have no seam.


This scarf used the ballet Swan Lake as its muse. In this peice I did a more controlled layout using the top to draw swans on the chiffon water. The swans held their shape beautifully across the scarf. When laid flat you see swans floating on blue water.


This next piece was a gift for my mother and she was married in a peach gown so I darkened the color to recognize her 30 years of marriage! It was burgandy, orange and green merino top on silk chiffon. You can see the effect that the wool has - creating bubbles on the silk.

This last piece was made from old scarves that were cut in half and then slit every two inches. Rambouillet roving was woven into the slits and fleece was added on the edges for effect. The roving created an excellent shirred effect. It is very interesting to experiment with top, roving, fleece, silk bits, etc and see the different effects that occur! I hope you all enjoy your nuno play as much as I have!

Nuno Felting

This is my biggest experiment to date with Nuno.

I have an abundance of wool and also a seemingly endless supply of scarves. The two I used today I have owned for almost 30 years and while they are full of precious memories, I wanted to bring them into my future too.

This blog will be more pictures then words because I know the pictures will be what you study.

If I had one small piece of advice, it would be to repeat what you already hear every day - "experiment!" Each scarf I used behaved differently with the batting. The one shown was able to receive the wool fibers easily, while the other one (not shown) with a tighter weave, required some additional fiber on top and on the edge to finally bind the scarf with the wool. However, I loved the way my other scarf crinkled in response to the felting process.

For fiber I decided to go with batting. Yes, the books say to use roving (although I think they mean top and you could certainly use both as long as the wool is fine)but that nice roll of batting was calling out to me, so I hand painted it using the scarf as my muse.
I knew the color would morph dramatically from the original design, but that is half of the fun!. And it gave me a starting point and confidence in my color lay down - plus I love to paint wool. I only mention this because many of you may do your Nuno with roving you have purchased and you may not monkey around with all this dyeing alchemy. But if you do, it's lots of fun. It just takes a little more time. In fact, I allow one day for dyeing and then rest for a day while the wool dries before coming back to the actual felting.

You can see how the colors blended and ran and held their own at the same time. It's one of the things I love about blended color. This batting has not been felted at all, it has just been gently put through a heat-set dye. I wrapped it in a towel, put it in a lingerie bag and spun it in the washer before laying it flat to dry.

After a goods night rest and many repetitions of examining and re-examining my roving stash I was finally ready to commit to felt.
I lay down the bubble wrap (bubbles down! - if you don't you will get tell-tale bubble marks in your felting.) I have to admit that I gently s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d the batting out until it was even and almost one-third larger then my scarf. Then I put the batting down on the bubble wrap, the scarf on top of the batting and finally I arranged some leftover robin's egg blue and turquoise roving on top of the scarf, again using the original scarf pattern as my inspiration. One other thing I learned while doing this is that I could have thinned the roving even more. I had done a great job with the batting, but I feel that if I had to do it over again, I would have thinned the roving even more.

This is the part where you get so excited you can't stand it. It's like looking at a bowl of cookie dough and wondering who invented baking? Why not just enjoy it as is?

Now lay an old sheer curtain on top of your fiber sandwich to hold the fibers in place. Then take some mild soap and cold water and sprinkle it over your sandwich. I wore rubber gloves because my hands get so dry and then just massaged the entire scarf for about 20 - 30 minutes. I kept peeling the curtain off to make sure it didn't bond with the scarf and it worked out fine.
Once you've massaged the fibers in the cool soapy water enough to see they are grabbing the silk, you roll them in bamboo and hard felt as you normally would, just forget about the hot water. I did this for quite a while - well over an hour and were my arms sore the next day! I just kept thinking about the Tibetan video from my earlier post and decided I could just get over it and keep rollin'!

Once the felting was done, I rolled it in a light cloth, put it through the spin cycle and then hung it to dry.

I can't wait to share the pictures!! they will be inserted here soon!

Transformation is a great exercise and it was so much fun to see the color, the scarf, and the wool combine and change and blend into something new.

Mongolian Felt Making

Nomads in Spirit

Sometimes I feel like a Nomad of the Intenet, wandering cyberspace searching for some creative nourishment. I am looking for an idea, information or presentation that connects me to the rest of the world in a soulful way. I am looking for something I have never seen before, but something I recognize never-the-less. I know it when I see it. A bell goes off inside me and says, "Yes. This has meaning. This is rich and rings of truth and came from a heaven I know. And if someone else made it, that means they've been to my heaven - we've both been there, even if we've never met." Even if we're all pretty much nomads wandering the earth.

I find it in theatre, music, dance, art, nature and of course wool. These connections. They are like a warm energy. They are a raison d'etre. They inspire, please, energize and comfort.

I imagine I am making a photomosaic of my response to life and while I am not yet certain what the big picture looks like, I do recognize the small images when they present themselves. So part of my work as an artist is to go through my day wandering in search of a flower or sunshine or shelter or stream of consciousness that I can paste onto the canvas in my spirit and say "Yes. Here's another piece."

This video is one of those images. Some of you may see it merely as a study in anthropology. I see it as a marvel of timelessness, humanity, survival, simplicity, art, engineering, and the life-saving connection to the world around us. I hope you enjoy it and maybe even paste it into your mosaic.

Shepherd's Harvest Festival -
Shepherding has a lot of lonely moments from lambing in the dark nights of late winter to hauling hay and grain in the high heat of July. We find great solace in the country and in the peace of the animals but much of our experience happens in solitary.

Until festival time!

Shepherds, spinners, knitters and other magical folk come out of the woodwork for a celebration of spring and the bounty that this year’s wool harvest brings.

A county fairground in Lake Elmo, MN comes to life with musicians, shepherds, and artists. Booths overflow with all the fixings a fiber artist or just a fiber lover could dream of. There is raw fleece, roving, combed top, handspun yarns, woven rugs, knitted shawls, felted hats and slippers and more then the eye or the mind can inhale. Alpaca, llama, buffalo, goat, rabbit and sheep fill the outbuildings with their charm and unabashed personality. And musicians delight and relieve shoppers and vendors alike. Commercial America melts into the background and the peculiarities and extraordinary talents of this melting pot bubble to the surface and swirl around in a dazzling display.

My son Christopher said it looked like Diagon Alley – the great street in Harry Potter where witches and wizards go to shop. It’s true everyone had some magnificent woolen art to wear. Felted bags, woven shawls, knit sweaters, everything made with love from the hands. One vendor remarked that it was the only time of year when it was acceptable to pet a stranger! Something as simple as wool and plant dye becomes art and wraps you in a wonderful spirit of creativity, peace and nature.

It was also a celebration of family for this world often presents multiple generations both in shepherding and artistry. For our part, we had the Loomis family wheel, circa 1870, to anchor the booth and attract onlookers. My daughter Heather (see picture above) wore a hat and sweater I made from our yarn, and spun our wool on one side of our booth while my daughter Kelsey knit her handspun to the delight of the shoppers on the other. Every grandmother in the world wanted to know if Kelsey’s large wooden needles – a gift from her own grandmother – was the secret to her skill.

We celebrated Mother’s Day in mystic Avolon style as Heather gave me a mobile made of twigs and wool and her handmade charms with glass images of 5 generations of women. After my daughter-in-law, Eszter, retrieved the fleeces from the competition we added our ribbons to the mobile and hung it all on the Great Wheel. Mystical and real all at the same time.

And to top the weekend off, I celebrated finishing up a felted sweater of my own design! I have sworn off knitting for at least 3 weeks so my little muscles can recover.

If you have a festival like this near you, I encourage you to go. You can travel to another world, uncover untold riches and never have to suffer an airplane.