I Finally Got a Dog!

As many of you may know, I, who have collected a herd of cats over the years have finally found my best friend. His name is Petey, or as my SO and I call him, Snorky. He's a Japanese Chin rescue dog from Furbaby Rescue in Bellingham. He's still a pup and a bundle of energy and lots' of fun, fun, fun. I have him profiled in Dogster.com. Now, I'll have to felt him his own little dog coat and I mean little as he is only 5 pounds!




Petey has developed a love of chasing squirrels and will scout the tops of trees in specific locations on our walks where squirrels have been last seen. They've been raiding the wilted sunflowers outside our front window and he has been going nuts watching them! He's about as big as they are, but doesn't know it. So the cats get a bit of a reprieve while the squirrels gather their nuts for the winter as he is very distracted.

Finished another tea cozy. This time I used Merino wool, Mohair and the influence of Tiffany.

Here are several images of the process in creating my tea cozies. It's generally the same Artfelt process as other items I make.







For the smaller, individual shapes I use cookie cutters as a mold and thoroughly poked the edges of the wool around the perimeter of the cutter with my felting needle in order to get a good shape. I wasn't satisfied with how the butterflies looked after they were felted, so I created another pair that I used as the top embellishment.

After it's felted, I needle felt the leaves on to the surface and then sew the flower layers with a bead as a center embellishment. I use fabric glue and needle felting to attach the two halves around the top part, and buttons with elastic cord for the bottom under the spout and handle.

The thick wool helps keep your tea nice and hot for quite a long time.

Creating Curtain Panels

OK, this is diverging from my pet projects (I know, boooo), but you can expect this detour from time to time as my restless imagination wanders off into Unfocused World. Actually, I have completed several projects for business and pleasure. Here, I created a large curtain panel for my bedroom made out of Wensleydale fleece. I really love felting with Wensleydale as you get an amazing texture from the locks. The top red part is Mohair that has a curl of its own, but seems to adapt well to the exaggerated serpentine pattern of the Wensleydale underneath.

Basically, the technique involves a very large sheet of the Artfelt paper. I used an 80 sq. inch sheet (spliced to get the width in one direction) of the paper for a 4' sq. window (with a 33% shrinkage rate) and applied 2 very thin layers of Wensleydale fleece - one layer carded and applied horizontally and the top layer of the locks slightly picked apart and applied vertically.

I crawled around on the floor for 3 days the wool to the paper. It only took around 12 oz. of fiber. To set up for felting, I took it out to my driveway, placed face down on a large sheet of 2mm plastic and wet it down using a garden sprayer filled with water. I used foam pipe insulators to roll it up on and 10 feet of a fabric silt sock (the ones you use for 4" French drain pipes) to hold it. Of course, the wind always picks up when you lay out a large plastic sheet. However, if you get some dirt on the paper side, it will wash down the drain when dissolved. After I rolled it up and contained it, I flopped the log over my car in order to drain the excess water.

It flopped around curled up with 2 pair of tennis shoes added in the dryer for an hour and then another 15 minutes unrolled on it's own. It took 5 large pots of boiling water to get all the paper dissolved, doing the red part last to avoid the dye bleeding too much. I then ironed it and blocked it somewhat. I needle-felted fleece to patch any holes that might have occurred that looked bad. After it dried, I hung it on the rod using those curtain rings with the clips.

My next large project like this will be to create a set of curtains for my guest room using combed Merino roving from Skacel. These curtains should be easier (hah!) as the width is halved, so I won't need to wrestle with it so much. I'll still be crawling around on the floor though. They'll be a forest green to olive color.

My friend, Nancy, loved the idea so much that I helped her create 18" x 72" valances for her fiber room using the same method. They turned out great! I hope to teach a class on creating, perhaps a cafe curtain.

Ruff Work

I love to make these dog coats. People have responded well to them and they are fun to make.

When I discovered Artfelt, I immediately had the idea of creating one-of-a-kind felted dog coats. Why shouldn't your beloved pooch where something beautiful and unique?

In addition to wool, I use glass cabochons, glass beads and mohair accents. Flip the collar up and you get an Elizabethan look. One of the projects on this list is to create matching human and dog coats. These would be custom orders since sizes in humans and dogs vary, of coarse.

The process involves drawing your pattern onto the Artfelt paper, laying out the design with a felting needle, then wetting it down, rolling it up in plastic, containing the log in a nylon stocking and then putting it in the dryer for 30 minutes or so. After the felting process, the paper is removed with boiling water poured over it and then the coat is steam ironed into the final shape. The glass cabochons are completely encased in wool and then cut open and finished to expose the glass after it is dried. The flowers are felted separately and then individually sown on with glass bead centers. The nylon strapping is sown on with heavy duty thread. Snap buckles are used for ease of getting on and off. A washable fleece strap cover provides additional comfort. Each coat takes about 10-15 hours to complete with all of the handwork involved.

So, a lot of ideas for more coats are in my head and now that Fall is coming, it's a good time to ramp up the inventory. You can see more coats on my Pet Effigy web site.

Getting Started

Well I've finally taken the leap and started a blog so I can vent, er share my experiences and processes of my craft - fiber arts - with other like-minded souls. I take it that one can start a blog about one's art by giving a personal history of a evolutionary process in more detail than a mere quickie profile. It helps compose one's momentum too, I think. Not meaning to sound narcissistic, here it is then:

I've been a fiber artist of one sort or another for a long time - almost 30 years. Sure I did the Campfire Girl crochet project thing (which I just couldn't get the end of the rows to transition properly on that stupid poncho!) when I was a kid. I dabbled in sewing too. My mom is a great seamstress, so I learned from her. However, in my twenties, I taught myself how to knit. I didn't really start with a simple project; I launched straight into a sweater (I have a pattern of insanity when it comes to learning new skills). And not just any sweater but an asymmetric cabled cardigan called Blackberry (prophetic) out of Classic British Knits! I did the front sections well but the back turned out to be a different interpretation of the pattern than intended. No chart, just long lines of hieroglyphic text that I had to decipher and follow. *P2, cr3l, p7, cr3r, p4, k1, p4, k3, c6b, p2* rep from * to * until you lose your mind as you have no business tackling this pattern right out of the starting gate! From the picture, the back is supposed to look like the left sleeve. Not even close. I zigged when I should've zagged, I guess. Now I find that charts are easier. At least for me. The worst part of learning to knit was trying to hold the needles right while creating the knit and purl stitches. All thumbs, you see. Plus I had a sneaky feline supervisor assisting in making sure I had more ends than necessary. With much practice a perseverance, my knitting has greatly improved and at my last count, I have 25 pairs of hand knitted socks in my sock drawer and my sweaters are turning out much better.

After my divorce, I went back to college. As a single mom, I pursued a practical degree (Psychology), added Human Services (double practical major) but my heart was in the fiber room where I added a Studio Arts major in fiber to the list (another example of insanity). Fortunately, I had a zillion art credits from a previous stint in college (including oil painting and bronze sculpture), so I could concentrate on the impenetrable art history classes left to take and weaving. Weaving was a great meditation from all the stress of taking classes like statistics. I also learned to spin and joined SpinDrifters, the local guild in Bellingham. Fiber has been my hobby until recently, when I decided to become a part-time pro.

I discovered needle felting several years ago and just started making likenesses of friends' pets. I love the organic 3-dimensional qualities of needle felting. My sense of humor comes out in my work as I create more caricatures rather than realistic looking items. Pictured is Lewis, a very proper and showy flame point. Although here, he's a little less dignified looking.

I also create what I call 'Herchomers', needle felted gargoyles straight from my imagination. I've sold those in a gallery in Snohomish and now on my web site.

Artfelt is another discovered medium that I really love. It's a felting process that uses a special paper to lay out the design and a clothes dryer to do the felting process. The dog coats for sale on my web site are created using that process. In addition to dog coats, I create tea cozies and clothing for humans. This technique has many possibilities and the ideas just keep coming. You know you've found your medium when the work flows out naturally, not forced.










This is a jacket I created for Skacel Collections using the Artfelt process.

So that's enough about me. It's time to talk about the work.