the nitty gritty on felting lanterns

I wrote about  making lanterns with felted wool a year ago, and as I am making some this year (as opposed to helping children make them)  I thought I would give an update on the process, and see if I left any glaring holes in my non-instructions.  (For the real deal, please see the archived Living Crafts magazine; I'm sure there are some stunning photos as well to encourage you as you wrangle your wool.)

First, I will say that there is a learning curve here.  I asked Eliza to join me in my endeavors today and she said, "Mom.  I thought that project was, well...a little tedious."  There you have it.  I have reached the zen of the art of felting wool lanterns, but the path was trying and maybe a little tedious.

First I did  a lot of things wrong and made a lumpy bumpy holey squiggly lantern.  To avoid this particular problem, I would first suggest assembling all of your materials from the start, so that you don't find yourself with water running down your forearms and dripping off your elbows as you scramble for another length of wool.  Or hollering for one of your daughters to come help you with the scissors 'cause you're afraid to let go of your precariously wooled balloon.

Ah, here we go - materials.  You will need:

• a balloon - I am enjoying using balloons that are approximately between 4 and 8 inches in diameter, but you could go bigger.  The lantern will shrink some while you felt it.
• a spray bottle with cold water
• access to hot-ish water and dish soap (I used the grungy tub below, with a couple drops of soap and kept the bottle on hand for some additional dosing of the wool)
• lengths of wool roving that has been carded, gently teased out to a couple inches wide.  Depending on the size of the balloon, you will need 3 - 6 or so of these.
• 3 yards (not, um, 3 feet, as I mistakenly used for my first attempt) of WOOL yarn (not, um, acrylic, as I mistakenly used for my first attempt)
• a towel or two to clean up from all the drips.

the fancy studio space

Based on my weak memory and the notes I had, this is what I did:

Blow up your balloon.  Make awful face at the taste of the thing but press on.  Spray lightly with the cold water.  Holding the tie of the balloon, wrap each length of wool around the balloon, being sure to cross pieces and covering as many holes as possible.  Spray as needed to encourage the wool to stay in place, but don't get it so wet that it droops off like a soggy diaper. Please trust me on this.  While holding your balloon carefully aloft in such a way that nothing falls off of it, wrap the piece of wool yarn you thankfully cut ahead of time around and around the balloon, again trying to criss-cross as much as possible.  The idea here is to hold the wool in place and it does a marvelous job, thank goodness.

Now you begin the very precise method of water felting called the "dribble pat pat".  Taking fingersful of hot, lightly-soaped water from your tub, dribble and pat your way around your balloon.  Don't smear or push or rub just yet.  I developed a technique I call "drumming the fingers", and I do just that, lightly, all around the balloon.  And then I cheat and add some drops of soap directly onto the wool itself - just a little, mind you, but enough to make the stuff start sticking like it's supposed to. Dribble pat pat. Drum drum drum.  Coax the wool over any bald spots.  What's happening here is the fibers are starting to mesh together and the material is starting to resemble something like felt, or the promise of felt.  Then I start getting a little crazy, once I'm pretty certain nothing is going to really move in any disastrous way, and I drum with my whole hands, bouncing the balloon between them, clapping both sides of the balloon.  Then you can start rubbing it between your hands, or against some bubblewrap if you have some handy (better have gotten it when your hands were free, or you'll have to make do).

Ah, here's a picture of the lumpy bumpy - still, not bad for not really remembering clearly how to do this, but my major mistakes here were a) too much dribble - made for soggy wool that kind of clumped instead of meshing and b) I used a beautiful red acrylic yarn, and only one yard of it, which wasn't enough to help hold on the wool and didn't shrink along with the wool as it is supposed to.  The final result is endearing and the loose yarn makes some lovely squiggles, but it didn't turn out the way it was supposed to, you see.  It looks more like a retired hat or something.

Once your wool all looks like it's of a piece - like it's felt, and there are no wisps left and it is going to stay together if you let go - then you can pop your balloon.  You'll have something like what you see below.  Now gently squash it, top to bottom, and gently rub.  And rub.  And fold and rub.  And massage.  And the longer you do it the more vigorous you can get.  You are further felting.  I would just suggest that you check it once in a while to make sure that you are not doing such an awesome job that you've felted the top right onto the bottom - I had a bit of a scare on that one.  Roll it into a sausage and massage.  Fold it in thirds and massage. Watch some TV and massage it, though that might go against everything you thought you knew about felting.  What can I say, Helena Bonham Carter as the Queen of Hearts with her "jabberbabywocky", I was drawn.  

When you are really quite done with the whole thing it is time to rinse in as hot a hot water as you can manage.  Here you are further shrinking your piece and rinsing out the soap you used earlier.  (There must be a reason to not use too much soap - it makes the job SO much easier, but I think maybe you don't want to wash out all the lanolin? Perhaps that's what makes wool burn so slowly? This is just a guess on my part - I can't find anything about it on the interwebs.  But even so...use as little soap and as much patience as possible, that might be the way to go.)

You're almost done! Now you can put another balloon in the shell to give it some shape as it dries, or stuff it with bubblewrap, towels, or rags.  I set mine on our floor vents with balloons in them, and they dried quickly.

pre-drying - looks like a verrrry small beret.

It is all still very much worth the effort.  So warming, and so beautiful...

Twisted wool roving worms

Our friend Jen showed us a new way to play with wool - yipeeee!! Really. If you are at all into making things with wool, you need to try this.  I have no idea what to call it - I've been googling all kinds of descriptions just to see what all a person could do with this, but I'm not coming up with anything! (ok, I just went and looked again. For a long time.  Nothing.)  I took pictures as she made a few pieces, and then Eliza got excited about making a photo tutorial, so here is a combination of the two for you!

You will need:  

wool roving (the carded, unfelted "loose" wool - it's still recognizable, though sometimes dyed, as coming from the sheep. The wool we used for this all came from my friend Emma's beautiful Jacob's sheep, and are all naturally dyed.)

wooden skewer - you could also use a pencil or a chopstick, but the skewer makes for a nice, tight roll, and is long, which is good for the twisting part.

A foam block helps, but if you don't have one already for needle felting, don't worry about it; a table top will do.

Wool, skewer, and foam block - check!

Lay out a piece of roving about 2 inches by 3 inches in size.

Lay the skewer along the side closest to you, on top of the edge of roving. You are basically going to roll the piece of roving like you would a roll of sushi, up and over the skewer, tucking in tight as you go.

Eliza style - preparing to roll

Jen starting to roll

After the initial tuck and roll, you can use one hand to slowly twirl the skewer away from you while maintaining tension with the fingers of the other hand, continuing to coax the wool around the skewer, and to keep it even.  What is hard to show in a photo is how much tension there is in the fingers that are riding the roll.

One hand twirling the skewer away from you, the other providing tension

Eliza's trying to keep an even tension here, and doing a great job, though her hands are smaller.

Twirling...

When you've twisted the whole piece of roving, and it's nice and tight, you can slip it off the end of the skewer, and voila! A worm! Someone has a more elegant name for what you have, but that wouldn't be me.

Now what can you do with your worm?? Aha...well, it could become a mustache, non?

It has a nice elasticity to it, and can actually be bent into all kind of shapes, and needle-felted in place.  In the photo below, Jen has figured out how to add another color by layering another piece of wool roving over the end of the first worm, once it has been slid almost all of the way off the skewer.  She's brilliant that way.

One loooooong worm

We've been spiraling them into these wonderful little pieces. Once they're spiraled (and they kind of stick together), you can use a felting needle to secure them, poking from the outside toward the center of the circle.  We've also put a backing on, which you could make from a felted sweater (just needle felt the whole thing right onto a cut circle of felted sweater!) or could needle felt a circle of roving quickly, attaching it by, you guessed it, needle felting.  Shoo, articulate, aren't I? 

Simple needle-felted backing

 Well, I hope you can figure this out, that you are as excited by wool worms as I am, and that you let me know if you've ever heard of this before! Jen learned it from an artist who creates whole creatures and hats and such from pieces like this...we'll share what else comes from this inspiration in the coming weeks, 'cause we can't seem to stop...

Eliza's rose

Ani's spiral

A collaborative spiral

 Shared on The Magic Onions for their Friday's Nature Table round-up. Check it out!

hummmm

Walking a neighbor's dog

The day after we arrived home from the ice storm, it looked like this. Balmy. So of course we went out, along the bike path one day...

 ...and to the ridges another, for some warm wind and squishy tromping.

(Don't be completely fooled by these photos - my girls are at least half polar bear, and I was, in the meantime, wearing a down vest and my hat. Winter is still around here, somewhere...)

Today was a good sampling of the kind of busy we've had this week. Ideas are ricocheting off the walls, brains are humming, and I'm just trying to catch up.  Eliza has picked up her camera again and is thinking about starting a blog.  She just finished the first chapter of a book she's reading aloud to me (lucky me!) - Indigo by Alice Hoffman.  She is so tickled to finally be enjoying reading, and those chapter books are such good milestone markers. 

 Today we had a go at a game we've had for a while - Frog and Toad - it's a maze making game that you can play several ways.  After piano practicing and getting some cleaning done together (Eliza tackled the breakfast dishes while Ani and I folded laundry), I pulled out the needle felting, which we all did for a bit and then Eliza started asking about the new sewing machine that has been sitting all new and shiny in the art room. Alone. Off. Silent.

 So I faced my fears about machines - even new shiny ones - and we got down to it. I learned how to thread the bobbin, thread the...um...thread, and finally we were ready to sew.  I handed that bit over to Eliza who already has more experience than I do. It was great! I feel like I kind of understand the machine, and she is beyond happy to have something to work out her ideas on.

Figuring it out - photo by Ani

I convinced her to start with something simple - a bag - rather than the "valentine's dress!" that she was dreaming about.  Let's just say I was feeling overwhelmed.

 Everything seemed to need to happen at the same time today, which was a bit anxiety producing for me, as I seemed several steps behind each one of them, and pulled in a couple different directions, but the girls were getting along which helped so much, and we managed to eat and make it to E's piano lesson, so I guess it all worked out.  Eliza and Ani decided that it was time to start Ani on some piano lessons,  so they spent a while at that (Eliza is the teacher, of course).

 There was reading Shel Silverstein aloud at lunch, and the making of cardboard books, and more reading of Coleman and by the time Dan walked in just in time for me to run to bando class, I needed the 3-breaths during each pose and the silence of the dark night to recharge a bit before letting myself become enveloped again by the crazy, lovely, humming whirlwind that is this home.

Felted Wool Solstice Lanterns

Nov 16, 2012 note: There is a new post about making felted wool lanterns with more of a how-to here.  Maybe between the two I've said something helpful!! Happy lantern making...

One of the families in choir invited us to make felted wool lanterns with them and a few other families, so yesterday we gathered in the community center that we meet in for choir (so close to our house), and did just that.  It sounded chaotic and frenzied, but really, it was just 10 children and their big people crafting and gabbing...This is going to be my own interpretation of what we did - we were following instructions that someone had from the current issue of the Living Crafts magazine, which would be much more precise than these, but here goes!

We all had some light color of wool roving or batting, which we pulled apart in long strips, teasing the fibers apart a bit. 

(Listening to instructions...)

We then lightly sprayed our smallish balloons with cold water, and began to wrap our wool strands around the balloon, making sure to cross the fibers of each strand with the others.

This was tricky, 'cause just when you thought you'd gotten your balloon pretty well covered, there would appear a bald spot, and you'd start fussing with that area, only to uncover another. The trick was really to get it just about right and stop touching it!

The next step was taking a piece of wool yarn about 3 yards long and wrapping it all around the balloon, again criss-crossing it over itself.   Aha! This held the wool in place! (This is where I moved from frustration to seeing a bit further ahead. Mind you, I wasn't even making one, I was just helping the kids...)

Now we filled our tubs with hot, soapy water and started to scoop out handfuls of the water and drizzle it over the wool. Then we would pat the wool, helping it to stick to the balloon and to itself. Drizzle, pat pat. Drizzle, pat pat. Repeat for a very long time. We found that adding a bit more soap, even a drop to the wool itself, was really helpful.

We kept at it until the wool felt thick and sturdy, as if it wouldn't easily tear apart. Then we agitated the wool a bit on the balloon, which just looked like rolling the balloon between our hands for a while, then rubbing it against or with a piece of small-bubble bubble wrap.

Finally, when it felt really sturdy, we rinsed the wool-covered balloon quite well (we had used a lot of soap, it turns out), and then it's time to pop the balloon! The lantern sagged, which is all right; the next step is rubbing the top to the bottom, gently at first, then gradually more vigorously, until you are rolling it on itself and massaging it steadily.  The last thing before drying was to run it under hot-as-you-can-stand-it water, continuing to squeeze it together - it will shrink and become even sturdier. They're done! Fill with a new balloon, some leftover bubble wrap, towels or rags - anything to help it hold its shape until dry (oh, at this point you have also cut a hole in the top if you didn't already have one).

We put metal lids in the bottoms of ours and placed a tea candle on that, and lit them in the dark this morning.

We thought they looked like ice caves...igloos...beautiful.

 ps - I wondered about putting a live flame in these lanterns - when they felt tightly, they shrink down considerably, and I was a bit skeptical about the candles being safe in there! But I learned that wool is fire-resistant, meaning that it is hard to ignite and slow to burn. If you are still uncertain, a small LED candle from the dollar store would look pretty too!