I managed to have a dash around the exhibition from the Morley Advanced Textiles group this week. So much inspiration, as ever. I was originally disappointed at these photos, but now I am intrigued by the reflections and the shadows.
Nuno felt clothing, silk
Machine knitting and inspiration
Knitted butterflies
Lampshade from old embroidered tablecloth
Grinling Gibbons carving interpreted in felt
Inspiration
Morley last week was experiments with merino tops on the embellisher and then wet felting the results. I was lost of inspiration, so just did some random circles, and challenged myself to make some pastel mixes and use them. I’m not sure about the results, perhaps en masse they might be impressive.
Before and after wet felting
Before wet felting – the pastels didn’t last long, as you can see.
Then more experiments with nuno. This time on undyed muslin, with undyed wool tops rather than merino. Much harder work, so much so, that I brought this piece home wet, rolled it in a towel, sealed with rubber bands, and then washed it in the washing machine at 60 degrees C. It certainly speeds up the felting, but the edges are hard to control. Still, when an expert talks about cutting off the end bits, this could be a useable technique.
More nuno experiments at Morley this week, with blended, carded yarns again but this time on to silk organza. This was much harder work than the nuno on muslin, but interesting textures arose. this piece is about 40 inches by 8 inches.
I’m not sure about the white backing, and I might try silk paints on the white surface to take this back a bit. Or, I might try stitching around the exposed parts and pulling them so they are more textured…..
