This is a dear friend’s heraldry.  Can you guess what he loves to do?  Now he can hang it on his tent to signal where he is camping and set his pavilion apart from the sea of white canvas at Pennsic.  He can say, ”Stop by my camp sometime.  Its the one with the felt banner with the scissors and needle in green and yellow.”

For my “real job”, the one that pays my bills, I am a preschool teacher.  This week we held a special event, a Fall Festival for the the families.  There were activities like pumpkin bowling, a hay bale climbing hill, cider and doughnuts and fall crafts.  Naturally felting had to be included because felting is the original fall craft.  Sheep are usually shorn in the early fall and naturally felt making cultures would make the bulk of their felt in the fall so that it could be used in the coming winter.  Here’s what we did.

In the week prior to the event the children helped me make prefelts.  I chose fall colors from my stash.  All in different kinds of wool. 

Then I asked festival participants to cut leaf shapes from the prefelt and throw it on the felting mat.   Small children cut mostly confetti shapes while adults made more leaf like shapes.  It did not matter as we wanted it to look like leaves on the ground, some of which will be broken.

When we had enough leaves the design was covered in three thin layers of Icelandic batting.  We then sprinkled it with soapy water, and rolled it up.

We took turns kicking the roll back and forth.  Since this was an event for little kids, we didn’t have time to finish the felting, but I took it home and finished rolling it in about an hour, thanks to the lovely fast felting nature of the Icelandic wool.

The result surprised me in that I didn’t think some of the wools would felt as well as the Icelandic.  I don’t tend to mix wool types as they will not felt at the same rate.  However all the colors seems to be fully felted into the base.  I think the Icelandic was good at reaching through the other wools and pulling them in fast.  I also may have helped that we used prefelts, so all the colors had a head start on the Icelandic.  This project has made me reconsider mixing a few wools now and then to see how it turns out.

Again this is made of pre-felt.  With these flowers I found a pattern in a Dover book and copied it almost directly.  Like the Scythian saddle pad, I blew up the image to the right size and cut each shape out and used it for a template for each piece. 

Here’s how it looked in the middle of the felting process.

First lets note that it is almost impossible to take a picture of the full image on a ball.  Balls just look better in person.

This design is the heraldry of my local barony, Cynnabar.

Again I’m using the prefelt technique.   However there is a small bit of needle felting here.   The only time I use it is when making balls, and then it is only used to tack the design to the ball until it can be more properly wet felted.

turkish tulip rug

This design is another example of the prefelt technique, except this time all the pieces were cut free hand, instead of by a pattern.  There are no examples of Ottoman felt from the 16TH century, so my inspirations are coming from other textiles and pottery such as these period examples.  The first is silk and housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the plate is at the Smithsonian’s Freer Sackler.

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.

This is a copy of a Scythian saddle pad.  The original was from about 500 BC, and was a grave find in Siberia.

The design is done entirely of pre-felt.  The whole peice is wet felted.  There is no needle felting of any kind.  It measures about 60×70 centimeters.

Look under the “pages” tab for a more detailed explanation of how it was made.