felting vessels

hey this is Cody from hadera fibers in apparel studio and today we're going to learn how to make belted vessels so if you haven't gone through the basic tutorial and don't know how to felt I would recommend watching our our other videos first before you get to this one cuz there's a build up between flat felting to felting a little bit of form and texture and then doing form as well so vessel starts out actually as a flat resist surface I prefer to use frosted mylar as a resist you can use bubble wrap which helps with agitations or some kind of other plastic but I find it's just plastic enough and also foldable and flexible enough and it's also a little bit more rigid so when I'm cutting it it's gonna be easier to take out with my form and that's just what I like to use you can use anything flat felting is a lot like form felting except for you use resists obviously and so when you start you're gonna start pretty much the same I'm going to try to use colors that I haven't used before so I'm gonna be on the purple magenta a bit more red so important thing to know if you're trying to get a specific color scheme like something on the inside contrasting with the color on the outside you want to take note of that before you start when I do forms and textures I always think about what's going to be showing up on the inside of the form that's going to contrast with what's going on the outside of the form so when I begin I begin exactly like flat felting where I in this one's a little curled up here when I first start I'm gonna lay the really thin sheets in opposite directions of each other now it's going to start out exactly like flat belting I'm only going to do one side at a time form felting is great for things like shoes and hats bags mittens socks I guess I suppose if you want to people make clogs from felt it forms it's a nice way to work sculpturally whereas if you work flat with flat sheets you're going to have a harder time building it up you're gonna have to sew them together or if that needle felt them together I suppose and this works a lot better when you're thinking about a form that you want to be seamless I think that's a good start it might actually be a little bit too much because I want to very thin layers and that way I'm gonna incorporate them together as I go along so when you're working on felting with form and specifically when you're working on something round like this so I have my insert on the bottom this resists and when I'm done felting this I've felt it for about five to ten minutes on the top of it and once it's nice and and got it started I'm going to flip it over after I remove my screen and then I'm going to fold these edges over and when they're wet obviously they're going to stick a little bit better to the form and then I'm going to lay down my sheet my new sheet of wool on this side and flat belt this side and I'm going to repeat that for however amount of thickness that I want before I move on to other textures or other things so I'm gonna felt this for about five to ten minutes and I'll see you guys in a little while all right so at this point I have almost like a half way felted form here our flat here and it's it's really nice an exaggerated cuz I went back and I laid a little bit more wool on top of it and one thing I forgot to note that I'd really like to emphasize is that when you're felting with a resist form like this and you're trying to make I'm personally trying to make a vessel you always want to make sure that the edges go over the form so that you can come back through and roll that on top of the back of it and I've seen this a lot when I do workshops when I give workshops for people that when they felt over the forum they don't leave enough of an edge so when they take the insert out of the felt it it's got a seam on it and that's not exactly what you want you always want to felt a little bit over the form and it's better to be a little bit thinner than this something like this like a cobweb form is much much better it's gonna leave a seam if you don't do it just right if it's a little too thin it's it's probably not great if it's about this thickness where I can just see my fingers through it that's perfect and that way the the felted fibers willing incorporate better into the opposite side of what you're felting it's just important to note as you go along so the soap gives me a little bit of an advantage and that it's letting it stick to the insert which is great it also has to do with it being mylar which is awesome because it's a textured surface that kind of attracts that kind of hairy texture so I'm gonna come back through and I'm gonna do exactly like I did on the other side exactly like flat flat felting very thin layers the idea and the reason why we use thin layers instead of thick layers is yes thick layers will felt faster but thin layers will felt better you're going to get a much nicer much smoother transition between things you're not gonna have chunky little blotches everywhere it's gonna be very uniform and nice everything's gonna incorporate well with itself and that is why we do thin layers it also gives a nice effect for color like if you watched our last video on texture the overlaying the colors in really thin sheets allowed it to gradate for one color to the next color very easily I want to continue to push the boundaries of what you know and felt but further we go along in these videos and so I'm probably going to do a little bit more extra in this one with playing around with more textures and instead of the textures being all about the fibre that I incorporate I'm going to go ahead and show you something new I'm gonna put a little bit more color in it I like that red but I think it needs something else in it dark color too okay I'll see you guys in a couple minutes so we've done about two layers on each side and I've been incorporated the pink and with the red so it's blended in pretty nicely but I don't want this to be just a flat boring color or even just two colors I want to add a little more texture into it and show you something a little bit new so here with me I have a hundred percent of single yarns these are from hadera fibers we have a mill and when we start our mill up we always have leftovers from grafting and what we do with that is we save it I personally like to save it there just cleans they can be used for all kinds of things but I give them away sometimes and I also have a hundred percent wool scraps that I keep for just this purpose so I'm going to leave a little bit on the side and I want some nice color play I'm probably going to tangle them up a little bit more I've also got some samples left over from long long long ago and I'm gonna take a little bit of these many schemes out it's that's a nice color to it and like I said this is these are 100% wool this is a two-ply with a Tulsa silk but it still will fell in with it and if it doesn't it still ends up being a very nice texture and the way I'm thinking about this the top of this vessel is going to be my opening so the bottom I want to come around and kind of peek up to the opening because I want you to be able to see it I want an interesting surface that's going to be nice from looking at all angles so I want loads a different color so after I incorporate the yarn I want to spread it out a little bit so that when I start with my roving I'm gonna have some room to let it come back down into the form itself and I think this time I'm gonna go over with a little bit this bright yellow and dark brown in just little pops and that'll be all in preparation for what our final texture will be which I'm going to show you after I'm done filling this so if actually I flipped this over and I've already folded over all the yarn on to the other side and it's at this point I realize I should have mentioned that as you get chunkier as your layers build up you're probably going to want to switch from just a paper bag to a little something more agitated so what I've done is I've taken several paper plastic bags and a plastic bag sorry and I put it underneath a piece of bubble wrap and this is acting as my agitation and I can get much deeper this way I can really dig down into those layers and cause some felt seem to happen down underneath of it at first when we were just beginning we were doing very light pressure again to refer back to the beginning tutorial you'll go from a light texture which is felt in the top surface down to a harder pressure which is going to felt those layers together especially when you add things so chunky like this like this yarn it's really important to get down in there and really add some friction to make sure that all of your layers are incorporating into each other at this point I want my seems to be very well blended so I'm kind of leaving alone these edges these are gonna remain kind of unfiltered so that I can peel up flip over and then these are gonna just gonna be right out I'm gonna pull on them and then slick them down and that way you can't tell where my seams are so now that I filtered down on my yarn I want an extra texture i if you remember correctly and you've been following along with the videos this was the insert that I used last time for the flat bold when I added the Lilian and I wanted something to protrude off of the surface because I want this texture to be more in the background so what I did was I created a bunch of smaller inserts that I cut with bubble wrap and so I cut them with bubble wrap for a specific reason you can use frosted my alarm but unfortunately the frosted mylar is not always easy and I know from experience doing workshops to find and take out when you're done with your form so I am hoping that bubble wrap is a little bit thicker and it's going to be a little bit more noticeable in the form when we start cutting things open so I'm just gonna place these around some really good artists to think of when you're thinking about texture and felt one is Margaret Wertheim who uses market Wertheim and then Diana Tamina Diana Tamina is a scientist who develop a method for for modeling a hyperbolic structures like coral reefs and then Margit Wertheim is another artist who uses the hyperbolic crochet to make coral reef forms you might also there's another one and I'll post her name down at the bottom who does really in filtered textures so this looks good I might actually put a little bit maybe one more in there just to get some more interesting because I want to save some of this color in here and I'm thinking of breaking up this seam on the outside and that way it looks more intentional if I should have something that's a little bit thinner this right there it might take a minute so what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna go ahead and lay over my my felt my next layer of wool just like we did the lily pad but this time I'm going to cover the whole thing I'm not gonna just put it in the center here I'm gonna cover the whole thing so that it's a complete layer and that way when we're ready to cut open the form and make this a felted vessel I'm gonna come back through with my scissors and I'm gonna cut out this design and that way I'm gonna have these hopefully have a structure that's going to protrude outwards kind of like this and you'll be able to see this texture underneath of it so we'll come back and you'll get to see that so I've added several layers about three on each side and then I went ahead and and fold on both sides I rolled it up and I've twisted and shimmied and shaked now we have something that's ready to be open so let's get to it now you can open it on any side depending on what kind of shape that you wanted if you want something like a handbag maybe you could open it up on a side here but I want something that's gonna have form and normally for that if I want it to be more round I would turn it inside out but I know I have texture on the side so I'm just gonna come back in through here with my scissors and make a small incision I try to make it small layer together I try to make it small because I can open it up and that way it doesn't look like a cut a hole in it it's important to do this before you wash it out before you do your shock baths because the soap again is the vehicle and it's going to help those fibers slip around now I am just going around in a circle to open up this hole a little bit so that I have something that's stretched out it doesn't look like I cut a hole in it just stretching out the fibers you can see it's fairly thick now all the layers are not quite filtered together and I can tell that because I can pull the part here and cut an opening here which is not quite what I wanted I might go back and felt a little bit more before I take anything out just do a really good thorough felt I'm not concerned about the surface because I know that the surface is felted and it's not gonna move around on me I'll just go back and pull a little bit more before I open it up anymore alright so now that I've cut it open and I've cooled it a little bit more I actually used a technique not like the one that I showed before in the basic felting tutorial what I did was I rolled my work up onto a cardboard roll I do this when I'm felting a lot larger things I'll use a cardboard roll and I'll roll the bubble wrap and the piece onto it tie it on and then I'll attach a towel wrap a towel around it and then instead of with my hands I use my forearms in my fist and I roll it back and forth and that's the agitation that's causing all these layers they like fill together and there's still a little bit of so they're some of the layers are still a little loose but it'll be alright I'm sure I felt it it or not that certainly feels felted enough so I'm gonna remove my insert now now a bubble wrap is certainly going to be harder are easier to remove but it's not as firm and the firmness helps it felt so now we have a form that is open but if you remember we have the bubble wrap to remove so now my chore is to find all the areas that I put bubble wrap on I believe this is one yeah so now I'm going to go around and cut out all the bubble wrap stencils that I used and I'll see you in a little while so I'm done cutting my inserts out I can't say that I really care for the way it looks I do like the forms that happen though and the textures that happens and that was really the goal of today after I was done cutting it I kind of went back and cleaned it up with the scissors just to make sure everything was round and didn't have jagged edges it was a little hard to find where the inserts were but with a little practice and if you feel on the surface where it's spongy you should be able to find just fine just a final look at the form I do I do like these forms I don't like the vessel itself as a vessel I might do something else with it maybe make something that's upside down so I might stuff it maybe and then do a little bit more with it that way well I hope you guys have good luck make sure to comment and like and subscribe you can visit our Facebook page and our Instagram which is fairly active also make sure to visit our patreon page and give us some support because we do need it thank you very much

Channel: Hedera Fibers and Apparel Studio

Views: 6,040

Rating: 4.807229 out of 5

Keywords: art, music, yarn, art batt, batt, batting, quilting, fibers, fiber, fiber artist, artist, sewing, pastel, felting, felt, crafting, vessel, knitting, knit, crocheting, crochet

Id: I-eZsw8vhCE

Length: 21min 9sec (1269 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 27 2019