This is the first of what will be a series of posts over the next few days. Each of them will cover a topic from my work at uni that I found interesting. This post, as the title may have hinted, will be about my work with wool in Curriculum and Method Studies: Technology Education 1B.
We started the semester with felting – take some wool fibre, apply warm soapy water, rub vigorously and hey presto! It’s felt! All I’ve got so far is a beanie that I don’t feel too bad about done and a number of bits and pieces of felt in a few colours that I don’t have any plans for as yet. As our felt work is to be handed up at the end of next week, I’ve been thinking about what else I want to submit.
The goal of the assignment is to develop our skills through making a example pieces we can use as a teaching resource when we’re out in schools teaching felting. As such, our submission is supposed to demonstrate a range of techniques. My beanie shows the use of a template (a piece of plastic slipped into the middle gives the beanie its basic shape and size) and felting several pieces together to get a pattern.
I’m planning on using another technique whereby the wool is bonded to a light fabric (“you need to be able to blow through it” according to the lecturer) during the felting process. This can result in interesting textures, colour effects, etc., especially if you use something like a lace or fishnet material. I can’t see this being anything more than a sample, though one of the other students has made some rather interesting gloves using this technique.
If I can figure out how to roll them properly, I’ll make a felt ball or two for fun – and because my few attempts today failed – and I imagine I’ll wind up making some baby’s booties out of the pieces I have on hand following the pattern we were given in class.
My last piece, if I can get it finished, will use knitted and embroidered wool in an attempt to add a design to a felt product in a more satisfactory way than by felting two pieces, then trimming them to shape and felting them together. I plan on knitting panels in my base colour and then embroidering them with other colours before felting the whole lot. If I can manage to knit enough, I’m also going to try to make a genuinely nice pair of baby’s booties, rather than some made out of odds and ends, with little pom-poms and everything (I was just reminded of the technique for making pom-poms – the Patons web site is a great source of information on knitting and the like).
When everything is finished, I’ll post a few pictures.