Wet Felting a Bowl

[Music] hi everybody today I'm gonna do a tutorial about wet felting and there's a lesson that goes with this as well online that develops a concept today I'm just showing you the technique for the video and I'll talk a little bit about materials I'll talk about technique and what makes my video a little longer than some of the ones on YouTube is that I do talk about some of the ways that this felting technique and project might tie into some of the other ideas that you're talking about in your art classroom as well as some helpful tips based on my own experience about what works and what doesn't with students so that when you're going to structure your lessons you have learned from my mistakes and hopefully won't make some of the same ones so I just want to start by talking about the material felting whether we're doing dry felting or wet felting is all done using wool and wool which as we all know comes from our friend the Sheep when we're doing felting we're buying a product called wool roving and wool roving comes either in a flat sheet or some kinds of these roll up little knotted balls but and there are different qualities some are fine or some are smooth or some are coarser this is one that I bought at Michael's craft store this is another pack that I bought on Amazon you can buy all sorts of different grades you can go to stores locally as well and find it and it's beautiful it's so lovely to work with its soft the colors are gorgeous and when we're doing felting we're generally pulling it apart and working in these really small Whiskey layers which we'll talk about in the video just a really quick quick introductory note about the difference between needle felting and wet felting the project we're doing today is wet felting so we'll be making these small bowls so this is actually the bowl that you're gonna see being made in the video here with all of its lovely pink colors but you can see there's a variety I've got this one is a bowl this one that I made a couple days ago is more of sort of a pear shape but this small cut opening here's another one that sort of a vertical this one I actually cut the top and started doing some detail work but you can see that you can make something that's really utilitarian like a bowl but you can also start to get into soft sculpture and I think that's pretty cool because soft sculpture can be a hard thing to teach students most of them have never had any sewing experience and it can be really technically difficult to try and create a structure and a soft shell around it so this is a really really easy technique but it's a great technique for talking about color about form about soft sculpture and the difference between maybe functional and fine art and where those two different lines blur so this is red felting and this product that we're doing today we're using a balloon and some of our wool roving and this is a really simple explanation but we're basically gonna be wrapping our balloon in the wool roving wetting it rolling it and we get a bowl so that's really as simple as it is with a few minor details here and there you can also do a flat wet roving a wet felting project rather where rather than rolling the felt around a form you can just lay it flat and create an abstract or like here I've tried to make it landscape and simply by rubbing the wool that's wet you can create a piece of felt and you can see that it's strong here we have lots of layers of felt and strong same thing with these bowls are really really sturdy I can wish it all up pop it open and it's good to go a really fast explanation with needle felting you're using a needle instead of rubbing wet felt using a needle and just poking and you can either poke layers that will roving onto a flat piece of felt to create an image or you can poke the felt into a shape and make something you know like although you walk it or a heart or some other sculptural aspect a really nice idea for older students is to combine the two and to create a wet felted form and then maybe to do a little needles you're sewing on top but let's get started I want to show you the materials first and we'll get started with showing you how to make one of these bolts okay so here are the materials that I have you see I have my felt here and today I've picked these sort of pretty soft pink colors you need some sort of form so there's the balloon or Styrofoam ball like I said I find these sort of water balloon size best you're going to need some sort of pantyhose I like to scour the dollar store or just the sale bin to find some old pantyhose any kind will work scissors a towel and I find these hand towels or something that size to be the most useful a bowl and some dish soap and just a note on the dish soap some videos will show you fancy soaps eucalyptus soaps those are beautiful but just dish soap or Ivory soap is going to work just fine for you okay so we're ready to start our wet felting now that we've looked at all the materials and I want to start by showing you something that I just made it's just a piece of 11 by 17 paper and I've drawn out a rectangle that's 11 inches long by 9 inches tall that measurement is not set in stone what that measurement is representing that's going to be a template for a rectangle of wool that we're going to lay out and that's the wool we're gonna wrap around our balloon so here's one that was started as you can see it's not big enough yet it's not filling up that whole template but we're going to eventually have a mat that fills that whole square and the way that I determine the size was based on the balloons that I'm using you might be using slightly larger ones you might be using a ball which is gonna be a different shape but the way that I determined it is by putting my my form down and just sort of rolling and checking to see is that shape that I've created here is that going to make up is that going to be a piece that's big enough to really wrap around not just the size of this form at the top as well because remember we want to completely cover this and we don't want any holes and when we go to roll it if there are thin spots or parts covered we're gonna get holes maybe where we don't want them it's okay if it's at the top and even at the bottom that can be hidden but we want to try and cover the whole thing and students are going to have a hard time knowing how big to make their felt map so it's a good idea to try and determine ahead of time and create some sort of template for them that they can put their wool down on so to begin the process all they're really going to need is that template in the wool everything else can stay to the side because that's just going to be a distraction at this point and you can see here the person that started this was doing a nice job because they weren't just putting taking the felt down this is really the hardest part of the project some kids will want to take big strips of felt maybe pull them apart a little bit and stick them down the problem students leave the pieces of wool is these big chunks is that they won't felt together well and here's an example this was a flat piece that somebody felt it but you can see that these strips this is where they just the student put down big strips of felt as chunks but didn't really pull them together and make them wispy layers and so they don't stick together quite as well so for this project we really want to teach them how to pull the felt apart so I like to actually show this to the kids maybe even before they have their wool is I show them that I pull it apart it's like cotton candy right they find cotton candy something gauzy and you can actually see through it right you can actually have them look through it and see that everything's very even maybe there's a few little lines here but there are no big chunks right and if they get big chunks you can even ask them which ones do you think I should pull out a little bit more right and then pull them out and they can even rip that off it doesn't have to stay one long nap in fact that's a good thing because what we want to do here is you have my nice thin piece even pulling these apart a little bit can be a challenge got a little competition how thin can you get it right so we're going to start laying these down right maybe first we'll go all the way across in one direction but the next layer that we do we are going to want to lay our wool facing a different direction so maybe crisscross or diagonal across each other and that's going to help the the felt to stick together better right now we're working in layers here we want about five layers I found that makes a nice thick thick foal that you even if you don't roll it and roll it and roll it it's still gonna felt really well and this is where they can have some fun they don't have to do all one color all at a time in fact it can be nice to mix and match your layers here and have sort of a swirl and this is the part 2 where we remind them that it's the first time they've ever done this and it's going to be an experiment to see how the material works and that's part of developing crafts right some of this is a learning process and we're going to give it our best shot but it's going to be a little bit of a surprise how it comes out and we'll learn from that and then the next Bowl that they make the next web felted piece we'll know a little bit more about it and that's how craftspeople we build up our skill so that's a great studio habit of mind that you can pull in here so I'm almost done making my 5 layers here and I'm having fun sort of pulling it the the wool find different techniques and everybody might have different techniques for trying to pull it into thin wisps and what I found as I was working as I started liking to create this sort of pattern of warm and cool Pink's so some of the Pink's are very hot like this and others are more purpley and have the sort of nice rows one and I also found there were contrasts of color too so I have some of these lighter wisps in among some of the darker ones so having the kids stop and walking around maybe look at the different colors and see who can identify what's going on with the colors and get to see sort of how that comes out of course these will all blend together somewhat let's just do a little bit more here you can see I'm just sort of quickly pulling it apart I'm getting a very nice big puppy I'll show you my big puffy mat here some of the bowls that I've made in the past I've done a contrasting like a complementary color on one side and a different color on the other and that way like you know blue on the outside orange on the inside and that can be fun because it's a sort of a pretty combination and the inside will be a different color than the outside this one is just all all one color let's see if they give you a feel for how thick that is I can squish it down here so that's gonna be all flattened down when we rolled around the balloon but it's pretty you can see all the different little swirls of color some of them I've made it more linear you can try and control a little bit this one I just have an all sort of uniform pattern but I love the movement that happens in here and one of the really pretty things about felting is that you'll have the form will be integrated with the surface it's all one and it's an a sculptural sort of design element to talk about how the surface isn't applied this is actually part of the form so here's my balloon I ended up getting a slightly larger one because I think I made them not big enough so those for testing this out ahead of time will tell you how big to make that template for the kids but you can see it here I'm just gonna put it down on magnets which I've started to squish down first it's still free fluffy feels so nice and soft and I think you know I was talking to a friend about this yesterday we she's done a lot of things and you know we both really believe that you know when kids work with these natural materials you have you know just talk about qualities and that's something that translates into drawing or painting when you want to talk about the quality of a line or the quality of a brush mark it's nice to have this experience with real soft materials hills and delicate things you have to be gentle with so here you can say I wrap this around the balloon and try and make sure that I don't have any holes so I'm just sort of folding this over I feel like I have there's a hole there maybe I'll try folding it the other way again that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world because it's at the top and I could just turn that into the opening but you know trying to is the best we can there's the bottom all right so I just have a sort of lump now comes the tricky part and this is easiest to do with a friend but we'll do it solo here you're taking your nylon and you're just gonna put that over the whole balloon all righty a horror story memories and wearing nylons in high school that was the 80s okay so you tie this off brings back old memories here you go all right so that's great the nylon is gonna hold all of that wall together so that when we roll it we can belt it and things will stay in place and I you know there are a few spots that might be thin here but I think it's pretty good so again that's a good thing to do with a friend for the kids so we can put this to the side this is a great time now to set up your space for rolling so for rolling they're gonna need a towel right in front of them and I like to have it a nice rectangle because we're gonna roll on it and this is where the water comes in so I like to use water that's as hot as I can of course I can't use more than super hot with kids because it's a safety issue so one idea is to have some water in each bowl and you could have a set amount the kids measure out and then just to come in and add some hot water and that might be a nice way to control how hot the water is that their guests have my hot water here and it's not that hot at all actually it's just fairly warm and for students I probably use a larger bowl for the sake this video I'm using a smaller one but the larger bowl will make sure there's less mess and I'm just putting in maybe like a teaspoon a tablespoon so the purpose of the soap is just to help the fibers to rub against each other so that they start to felt but there's it's not a chemical formula it doesn't there's not an exact amount yeah the one thing I will warn against is the more so if you put in the more suds you're gonna get so you just might want to stick to like a teaspoon so we're gonna take our felt ball we're just gonna put it in here let it really so can absorb all that nice warm water the heat helps it to shrink up a little bit too but really it's the rubbing that's going to cause the felting and you can see I try and squish some of that water out and then I'm actually gonna cut off the top of this here because it's in my way so now we just start rolling and you do about five minutes five six minutes six minutes is probably good the time it's enough time for the wool to really start to felt but if you go longer than that you'll have a harder time getting off the the nylon will start to stick to the fountain so we're gonna do some rolling with the nylon on and then we're gonna do some rolling with the nylon off I've been rolling for about five or six minutes and they can already tell inside that the wool is becoming felts and I can actually see it sort of starting to pop out of the see little hairs out of the nylon so I know that's a good time to probably stop and take this nylon off otherwise it will never come off but as I was rolling here I was thinking about being in India visiting in India and staying with family we met on the train that invited us to stay with them and watching the mom in the afternoon cooking chapati which are like tortillas and thinking about my own growing up and watching my mom cooking baking while I was in the kitchen drawing and doing things like that so it's fun there's something very purposeful about this work and for me it recalls some lovely memories of kitchen and cooking I don't know for everybody it would but that's what it brought up for me so here I'm just taking the nylon I'm stretching it and I'm trying to make sure I do not get that balloon just so you can see it and just cutting that and I do have a hole at the top there but that's okay so you can see here that the nylon is close to the camera you can hear it pulling it the felt and that's okay and I have to rip off sometimes it gets pretty stuff on there I'm just slowly you can see how it gets kind of stuck so this just means they didn't have enough layers of belts on the top there do you mean even say I want to say to the kids you might instead of bilayers it maybe diagrams like I've given you 25 grams of wool and you need to use that all for your layers or it could just be layers so here it is it's a a piece of felt I'm liking the colors and how they are sort of swirly there looks like I just have the hole at the top at the bottom the bottom is pretty good there so this is going to need to be rolled for another five or six minutes um you want you can sort of put it in that warm water that may help it shrink up again a little bit again try and squish some of that extra water out I think anything where kids stay at their table is better so they do not have a dripping belts ball that they're walking around the classroom with and then we'll just roll again so I rolled for about another five minutes and I've popped the balloon that was inside and you can see now that we have this sort of soft can't even squish it up great and then I can open it back up and it's pretty tough and I'm sort of liking the opening being it's sort of made its own opening the top it's sort of fun that it has this I'm not sure if I'll use that as an artistic element or not or maybe I'll cut that maybe I'll just cut it just to show you in fact I think I'll do that now but I did rinse I did rinse the soapy water out and I think with this one so I'm gonna cut right across it it's fun you can see the the layers here of the wool and I haven't done too much experimenting with shaping the felt afterwards just a little bit but I've seen people do slippers I've seen people do all sorts of bulls but you can pull it once you've pulled it into it or out of a shape that it's not going to go back into it so that if you want to make it bigger that's kind of the shape you're gonna get but it is something you can play around with a little bit I have this nice shake here I might try and stretch it a little bit until I get more of an open bowl you can also do things like you can cut the top in different shapes if you want to have a scalloped edge or little points you could probably make like a little little handles if you wanted to make it a carry bag so there are all sorts of fun things that you could plan to do with these but that's the bowl and it will take overnight to dry it's thick and so the water has absorbed into that and it's going to take a little while to dry sometimes I don't have it right here at hand but sometimes I use like a baking cooling tray so that there's airflow underneath it but we have some really pretty colors here and you can see how the the different layers sort of marbled which is really beautiful and kids can dry they can needlepoint on top of this they could sew ribbons on to it they could so be done to it you could sew other pieces of felt so I don't know what you'd want to make with this but say you had a little shape here take that and you could either needlepoint those shapes on or you could sew those on you can make a whole bunch of them make like leaves or a pattern so that's fun so I hope you get a chance to try these there are a lot of fun to make and they're pretty simple and it's a lot of fun to do even you know in small groups or try it with a larger group all right bye

Channel: Cathy Kelley Design

Views: 8,472

Rating: 4.7927461 out of 5

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Id: mx-n3I0NHCA

Length: 23min 25sec (1405 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 26 2019