felted cloche

Apologies for the lack of entries lately. I really have been busy making things though. The first one I'll post is my new winter hat! I've been meaning to get around to felting a hat since last winter and last Friday I finally did. I have a friend from the KC Weaver's Guild that is an expert felter and makes hats to sell locally. She invited me down to her studio and gave me some tips and information that I didn't know about felting. She also has a huge collection of old hat forms and she let me borrow this one in the picture.
As you can see, my hat is unadorned at this point. I'm still thinking about how I want to embellish it. I know I want some color along the edge, to make the flare stand out. But I'm thinking of doing some intricate embroidery around it as a sort of band. I can't wait until it's cold weather to wear it, I am so happy with how it came out. Cloches always make me think of the 20's and girls with bob haircuts.
Oh, some notes about the felting: This hat is made straight from the carded wool fiber, it's not knitted first. The wool I used is a grey New Zealand wool and you can see that it's quite a bit more fuzzy than most felted wools. (Merino is the most popular to use for felting.) The whole process probably took me about 4 hours from start to finish-a very short project actually. But the felting is all done by hand and so it's a quite strenuous activity.

Needle Felting

At the Kansas City Weaver's Guild meeting today we had a mini-workshop about needle felting. If you've ever done regular wet felting before, this is quite different. You're using very small amounts of wool to "paint" a picture onto a wool/fabric background. The felting is done by stabbing special barbed needles repeatedly through both layers to attach them together. You have to have foam underneath it to cushion the stabbing motion. It's really easy and pretty fast. The action of punching the needle in and out is officially called "needling", but we decided it was funner to call it "stabbing" and say things like, "This stabbing is so therapeutic."

It was fun to do, but I don't see myself doing anymore of it anytime soon. I hate to say this, but I don't really know what you would use it for except to make cutesy pictures on stuff, which.... is not my cup of tea. You can use a similar technique to make little felted animals though, and that would be fun to make with or for children.

The pictures are of me using my fancy needle felting tool (with 5 needles in it), my friend Becky using a single needle on her project, and my finished flower. I think I'm going to sew it into an eyeglasses case for my grandma. She loves putting flowers on everything she wears.