I am a natural fiber snob. Some people have annoyingly called me a purist. Ninety nine percent of the time I am using cotton, silk, wool or linen. I prefer stitching over gluing, and I have a hard time with printed fabric trying to look as if it were woven.
I recently discovered a machine that works with wool's natural ability of "felting" to itself. Since I love to work with wool felt in hat making; steaming, stretching and smoothing the fibers into shape is quite gratifying. Wool blankets as felt material is also a lot of fun for me. Hence my wool flower pins and kit. So when I first saw this machine that actually uses just the needles action, without thread or glue, I was intrigued so say the least.
My first project, (that I am going to actually write about) is making a pin cushion out of wool blankets that have already been "felted" and an old canning jar lid.
First I cut out a circle, 5 leaf shapes and a 5 petal flower out of blankets.
Without pinning, the leaves are "felted" onto the blue circle. There are 12 needles poking through all layers, causing the wool fibers to "felt" together.
All the leaves are now attached to the circle.
This is what it looks like on the back, see the green fibers coming through! This gives me an idea.
But first, I attached the white flower, but "felting" only the center. I want the petals to be loose.
Great, it worked!
Now back to that idea; I flipped the circle over and felted the leaves from the back side and look what happens!
{so exciting!}
Darn, I wish I would have done the back felting before I attached the flower, but I worked around it and it came out great.
I wonder..........
Wow! Look what happened when I felted the flower from the back. A blue center! Next time I will take pictures while felting the back , yes - I have three hands.
{so easily amused}
Now, make a running stitch all around the edge of the circle with strong thread, gather up, stuff and stitch closed. Grab the canning jar lid and apply some Fabri-Tac, by Beacon and insert into the lid.
Stitch on a pearl button, tie a bow with some of the french ribbon you have laying around and poke in some corsage pins. Wala!!
I'm thinking about putting some embellishments on some sweaters with this nifty machine.
xo
mi
