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.

I made these cute little booties for a friend’s baby.  They are really soft, made out of alpaca.

I realized that since I’ve been making fezs since long before I started this blog and I think of them as rather common place, I don’t have any on the blog!  However they are an important part of Ottoman costuming.  Here are some examples of felt hats in Ottoman era art. (Sorry I neglected or take down sources, or maybe the places I found them did not offer sources, but I believe these are both from the 16th century and are from European artists who are depicting what they saw while in Turkey.)  Notice both the flat top fez variety and taller cone variety.  Most hats seemed to be a base for turbans, and I suspect many of the turbaned figures where you can’t see the hat still are wearing one under all of that turban.  And some hats are worn by themselves. 

Here are some examples of my hats.

I haven’t made any really tall and pointy hats like those in the paintings because I haven’t known anyone that wants to wear one like that.  Sometimes it can be hard to recreate some fashions that may seem a little silly to us modern folk.

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 love it when customers give me artistic license.  He just said put some of that swirly stuff on it you like to do.  Cool!  I really do like doing spiral work.  Its very relaxing.  I love the process of joining one spiral to another.  Spiral designs work very well with felt because they are so organic and if they slide a bit during the felting process they still look like a spiral.   The hat was a bit tricky because it is made around a flat resist with a front and a backside.  I have pretty good spacial relations, but it was hard to visualize how the pattern wrapped around the other side.  It was hurting my brain.  Finally I looked at if from above so I could see both sides at once, and it all made sense then.

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.