When Is a Felt not A Felt?

A Scarf for Rasha

Just recently I received a  lovely kindness from my son's neighbour when he was very ill in hospital. Rasha made a meal for me every night while I was visiting my son and also provided tasty meals to take to my son in hospital when he was finding it hard to eat the hospital food. I wanted to make her a special scarf for her kindness. Her favourite colours were purple, blue and mauves.

I've never documented the process from beginning to end but as I knew that it would take quite a few weeks between visits to my son to get time to felt I wanted to give Rasha regular updates so she would know that her scarf was being manufactured.

First I went through my stash. I had quite a lot of blue and purple but all in a coarser higher micron merino. As I knew that Rasha would be wearing her scarf against her face and neck I wanted it as soft as possible.

Luckily I had some 17.5 micron in my stash bought when I first started felting and didn't know very much about wool quality. 

I also had some 90mm undyed margilan silk  bought just before Covid made supply difficult. 

Time to start dyeing!

I wanted muted colours so I was quite happy with the colours in the silk. But even though I reduced the Landscape dye to 1/4 strength you can see how bright it was when I put it in the slow cooker to dye.

Because I was rushing and trying to "cook" the wool quickly overnight I didn't take enough care when I introduced my wool to the dye pot and it came out very uneven.

Oh no! it was all blotchy and uneven and I didn't have any more 17.5 micron wool. It was beautifully soft so I decided to see how it would felt.

As it turned out the blotchy-ness was a blessing in disguise. When I started to felt it, the lighter areas reduced the brightness of the original colour and achieved the muted affect I wanted.

I had read about a technique for blending wool called dry felting - placing wisps of multi-coloured wool between sheets of paper then rubbing to achieve a very light pre-felt.

Here is a photo of the dry felting where I blended the two coloured wools between two sheets of paper.

I didnt use this technique for the whole layout but I found that I could sit and dry felt while watching TV at night. It certainly made the layout much faster and was way easier on my back. Certainly a technique I will use again but maybe use larger pieces of paper to get a more even distribution over the silk layer.

While I was busy dyeing and dry felting I was also waiting for the postman to arrive with the viscose I had ordered. I love it when parcels of craft materials finally reach my doorstep and this time was no exception - such glorious colours - they almost made my mouth water!

I played around for quite a few days with bits of silk from my stash, the dyed wool and viscose, working out what combinations would work best together. This part of the process is really important to achieving a satisfying final product. Every time I added bits or took some away I'd take photos on my phone to refer back to. This visual diary became my reference point for the final lay out.

Eventually I decided I wanted to keep it really simple and settled on the dyed margilan as the base, my dyed wool and just some fairly heavy viscose and throwers waste for texture and shine.

Here is the final layout. You can see where I have distributed the dry felted wool with very fine wisps of wool roving in between.

Once I'd wetted it down I added fairly heavy tufts of viscose and then draped silk throwers waste all over the design.

Here is my final wetted down layout waiting to be felted. I wanted the ends of the scarf to be neat and straight so I made the tufts of roving at each end slightly heavier than the body of the scarf then folded them back on themselves with the aid of a piece of bubble wrap. I learned this technique from a Fiona Duthie course (thank you Fiona). You can see the bubble wrap wrapped over the wool to form a neat edge in the bottom of this photo.

The scarf was hand felted until I was certain that everything was well incorporated and very firm. I was a little concerned about the thickness of the viscose on the very fine wool base so just to be certain that everything was very firmly attached I used a hand sander for a couple of runs concentrating on the viscose embellishments.

My measurements were based on a 25% shrinkage so a final very light fulling completed the process.

Here is the final result packaged up ready to be delivered:

And here it is being worn by Rasha!