Lee Thomson

March 30
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

A collection of experiments, all stitched together –

The black felt was an old piece of wet felting from a workshop that was old enough to be used for something else, so I experimented with acid dye (instead of just using food coloring and vinegar) to get a nice deep black. It was no harder than using the food coloring!

The white felt was to see how hard it was to make a thin, fine piece of wet felted material. I have made several pieces of dry felted material with the machine, and they are nice but profoundly perforated. Plus I wanted to incorporate rayon threads for !shiny! and the embellisher was not working well for that part, so I slapped this piece together. It went quicker than I remember, I think because I was working small and thin. The shiny came out more discreet than I was hoping for, but clearly present. While it was drying, I noticed I still had my washers from a series of rust dyeing projects, so I laid a row of them along the edge and got a series of lovely rusty donut shapes.

The end result was free machine stitched together in between two layers of soluble stabilizer. The stabilizer is stitched into the project and then rinses out. Theoretically. It takes a lot of rinsing, and until it is gone it acts more like starch and stiffens the project substantially.

One more March felting piece, and then April! I think I need to return to my 4″ squares for April, I’m losing focus…