Felted thank you bag

First craft posting in a while....

When in Ireland recently, a cousin's wife kindly took me on a girly day out while the men folk did manly things with tractors and fishing rods!!!

As a thank you, I made her this felted shibori'd bag... it is made from the shibori piece I made last year, and is lined in cream linen. I hope that she likes it.

I think it works better as an item of use (ie a bag) than a piece of created knitted fabric.

Here is the front...

and here is a close up of some of the detail in the back.

and because I cannot help to think about such things... Alice made fabulous bags. She felted using merino tops rather than knitting yarn up first. It is something to do with making a sandwich which you later cut open and scouring it with cut up orange bags. We were going to have a day doing it together this summer.

Rockpool

So what's with the daily posts? Well: sick child, work deadlines met, main Christmas activities on schedule - it's a weird time, so I am making the most of it.


When I went to Harrogate in October, I discovered Shibori. To most people this means a dye resist technique. But before the dying is the pleating and stitching - and this is the part that captured the hearts of my mum and I. She is doing stitching on beautiful, ivory silk. I decided to try felted shibori.

So I knitted a rectangle in pure wool. Then pleated and clamped and also tied in glass pebbles. Then I did hot and cold hand felting. The result was a lovely textured piece with lumps, bumps and ripples. The colours inspired me, so I couched threads, added some metallic fibres, and beaded away to produce this...






I am going to call it rockpool, and intend to mount it on a board (but what colour background do you think? Cream? Or painted sea blues and greens?). I am really pleased with it. It's quite unstructured, and for me, uses a nice variety of materials in unusal ways.


Here is a picture of the whole thing... as you can see, it is an uneven shape, but that suits the idea of a rockpool I think.