Sunday was a good day. Started with checking the indigo dye vat and it’s cooking along nicely. Its already developed that bronzy indigo “bloom” on top. That is from the previous indigo in the vat. The new batch I put in has a few days to go. Lovely isn’t it?
Around noon, my friends Dawn and Merrit came over for afternoon of felting. Dawn and I had a really good in depth discussion about the construction of felt shoes in the nomadic archeological record. Her position was persuasive and from that, the shoe plan changed from dimensional felting to needing a large flat piece. I had natural dark brown icelandic pencil roving which I was interested in using and we set up outside.
Laying out the fleece went quickly. Dawn and I are experienced felters and Merritt is a super fast learner. One of the coolest aspects of the day was to compare differences in our felting methods. The end results are the same, but we have slightly different approaches. That was neat to learn.
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I usually love felting with icelandic wool. It typically felts very quickly and produces a lovely textured wool. This particularl fleece had a LOT of guard hairs which seemed to impede the rate at which it came together. I admit that I was ready to consign it to the punishment pile out of frustration, however Dawn persevered and we ended up with a really lovely piece of felt.
This picture was taken after about 20 minutes in the dryer. I blocked it and its sitting on a drying rack.
Also accomplished was the discussion of the skin layer of my laureling clothes. Future posts will discuss the pattern we landed on for the shoes, as well as the patterns for the skin layer of clothing – pant, tunic and leggings.
