Last year I posted about my foray into shyrdak making.  It is a time consuming process that involves both felting and sewing and quilting techniques to create beautiful traditional patterns from Central Asia.

I’ve been experimenting with prefelt techniques to create some of the same patterns only significantly quicker.

This rug is made of Icelandic wool from Fence Row Farm.  The blue is a mix of two colors I dyed myself then put through the drum carder.

These purses are made from the same wool as the rug above.  The design is cut from one piece of prefelt.  The mirror image is used to create a whole new purse.  This is one of the advantages of this type of design.  The negative space is designed to create an equally beautiful, often mirror image of the positive space.  There is very little waste.

These bags are another experiment in design.  They are made from one piece of flat felt that is cut and sewn together on the sewing machine.  Most of my bags are wet felted in one piece but that process takes longer than felting flat sheets.  I’m still trying to decide if it really saves me time if I have to add the steps of cutting and sewing, and deal with some scrap felt that is created.  Also there are aesthetic questions, which way is more beautiful?

These are two pictures of the same bag.  The positive and negatives were used on both sides.  Again it was made from a sheet of cut and sewn felt .  This felt is created with a merino felting bat.  Merino and Icelandic are now my two favorite wools, which I plan on using almost exclusively from now on, because both are extremely fast felters.

I have been making a great quantity of felt the last couple of months because I am getting ready to sell at public crafts shows this season.  The Spring Craft Show in Saline Michigan, on March 24th will be the first.

Changing from selling only at medieval themed to modern events gives me freedom to create new designs…

and use modern colors!

A basket bag made with the urine reduced indigo on border leister wool.   The greenish design was dyed with golden rod and overdyed with indigo.  It has the same decoration on both sides.  Once the wool has made it to this stage there is zero urine smell left.  Remember that the wet felting process involves a lot of soap?

This would be a great basket for spinning or knitting.  It could hold half a pound of wool or more and will sit by itself on the floor.  Or it could be a nice market basket, strong enough to be filled with 5 pounds of apples.

This cute little basket is actually the baby version of a bigger one that sold before I could take a picture of it.  Fortunately I sold it to a friend, so maybe I can get a good picture of her with her with her basket in her garb.  This basket is made of natural colored Icelandic wool, grown on a small farm less than 100 miles from me.

I was thinking awhile back about my style of bag making and where it comes from.  Most of the bags I make are the envelope style, and in essence they are felt emulating a fabric form.  When I’m making felt with historic re-creation in mind, most of these smaller accessory pieces are conjecture.  I may have an example of a bag in a painting, but it does not tell me what the bag is made of or how it was made.  Since felt is so moldable I find it interesting that I sometimes think of my work in terms of other mediums, felt in the form that fabric or pottery would normally take.  In this case, its felt in the shape of a basket.  What strikes me about this kind of 3D felt vessel is that it is much more true to the nature of felt and how it wants to behave.  To me this form feels less like felt trying to be something else, and more like felt being and doing what felt does best.

I made this basket for my mom for Christmas last year.  Its made the same way as my flat bags, by wrapping around a cardboard resist.  This resist was oval shaped, then when I cut it open I cut two ovals off the upper corners to form the handle.  Then in the last stage of fulling I simply molded it into the shape I wanted it to be in and left it to dry.  Since wool is hair it wants to stay in the shape it dries in.  (Remember using sponge curlers in your hair ladies?)

Decoration on this bag is made using the prefelt technique, and the red lines are embroidered in wool floss with chain stitches.  The tassels are goat hair.