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...

Thoughts about The Pox

Do you remember when everyone got the chicken pox? When you could and did catch it at the store or on the playground?  When you were sent back to school while the scabs were fresh? Or maybe you caught it on summer vacation (like my sister and I did) and had to stay out of the sun for a few days, but everyone expected all the cousins to get it too.  Maybe you've noticed, but no one gets them these days, and suddenly there is great moral weight to knowing your child could infect someone else.  

my method of filling the sweatsock with oatmeal for the bath.
very high tech.

I don't think that used to be an issue back in the day when it was everywhere, but now there are, as a friend put it in an email to me, "moral implications of ... knowingly exposing (him) to such a contagious disease that not everyone wants."  I think that was the hardest part of my experience with these pox:  knowing that we had them and knowing not everyone wants them.

chatting with Mormor lifts the spirits

I went online at some point during the past three weeks of waiting for Ani to get them, knowing she might be infectious, wondering if I should really be going to all this trouble to keep her away from the general public.  (She hasn't been to the library, market, the store, choir, coop, piano - anywhere!)  The opinions varied widely - some people felt that disease is just a part of life and either folks have vaccinated or they are fine with their kids contracting the virus.  Others thought it was one's moral duty to quarantine a child you knew had had sufficient exposure to the virus.

Ruby Gloom, Shawn the Sheep, Sabrina the Witch

Early on, when I wasn't yet sure that the girls were getting sick, we wavered back and forth about going to a friend's annual Halloween party.   Those friends - who don't want their child exposed right now because of the particular timing of things happening in their lives - have since said to me, if you had only just brought them to the party in ignorance, she'd just be exposed and we wouldn't have any decision to make about it!! It's the knowledge that's been weighty and kept us at home.  

I think that we have managed the pox pretty well - neither girl has been totally miserable.  They are easily distracted and happy to take the baths every day and endure the greasing-up when I put salve on their pox.  When the girls were babies, I asked our trusted pediatrician about the varicella vaccine.  I think I put it to him as - is there something I don't know about the chicken pox, or is this mostly a vaccination of convenience?  I mean, if you were going to quarantine an exposed child and both parents worked out of the home and the child went to school, it would be a nightmare of a problem to solve.  He agreed - that was really the gist of it. Our lifestyle affords us some flexibility, so we opted out of that one.

sweet company

There are always extenuating circumstances that would make a virus like chicken pox a much worse prospect for someone than it is for us.  Pregnant women who have not had the pox, and newborns, as well as people with immune system challenges would all have much higher risk for complications.  We are very lucky.   The chicken pox virus has been inconvenient.  Friends have called, wondering if they should expose their kids.  It is a completely personal decision, but I advise them to look at their calendars and mark the days they could expose other people - and then add on another incubation and window of contagion for every one of their kids! 

sister party!

Ani told me very seriously today that the chicken pox got its name because it comes from chickens!! Wonder how she figures that works...I've read that it's called chicken pox because the pox look like spots that have been pecked at by chickens; that pox look like chickpeas (so appetizing); that they're the more chickeny (wimpy) of the poxes - as opposed to small pox, which by that reasoning should have been called Hugely Scary Pox or just about anything other than small pox.  

I have loved these days with Ani - the snuggling, the long baths, the stories, the endless pajama wearing - but we will be more than ready to join the world when it's over.

Gallery

There is so much art that happens in a day here; it is hard to know what to share.  Eliza spotted a large whiteboard Dan brought home, and quickly made a rendition of the Mona Lisa.  Can you see the resemblance?

There have been numerous portraits made recently.  I'm not sure what has inspired it, but I think they are lovely.  The color combinations just amaze me.

This vampire lady is made of cut paper - these are all from Eliza.

I kept a pan of gelatin from the gelatin prints we made a few weeks ago, but it turns out I waited too long and it got moldy.  Who knew gelatin would mold?  I would love to experiment with this again.

We haven't made as much leaf art as we have in years past, but there were a day or two of rubbings and drawings...they are always my favorite seasonal project.

These are drawings from the girls' nature journals, which are seeing more use this fall than they ever have.  I love Ani's drawing of loving puffballs...

Here is Eliza's detail of a single puffball mushroom.  I love the details and the shadow.  She is so observant.

Speaking of observant (am I bragging? Or just admiring???), when my dad came to stay for a week in October, the girls decided that it would be helpful to make some maps of places he might want to go with them.  Ani made several portable, pocket-folded maps of the park across the street, the bike path, the coffee shop.  Eliza decided to go for it and taped many pieces of paper together, making a huge map that is still hanging on our kitchen wall.

This was a spontaneous project, not one we had planned for (and I was preoccupied with sewing my first curtain!), and yet her ability to recall and represent is really something.

She noted where our favorite Japanese maple is, and knows how many streets there are between here and the restaurant uptown we like to go to.  She included the "stinko biloba" gingko tree and the bead shop, the hot dog joint and the cemetery.  She really got just about all of it, even the tricky triangle of traffic that happens around Domino's pizza.  She pays attention.  Suffice it to say, my dad did not get even a little bit lost while he was here.

Noticing the interest in the portraits, we jumped on an art class that was offered up the road at the community arts center this last weekend.  Eliza went, and then came home to teach her own class to Ani.

Eliza. And Munch's Scream.  Interesting...

Eliza

Miss Eliza, the art teacher

Eliza

Anika

Eliza and girl-eating plant

Anika

Frost and Pajamas

We're in the midst of days that start out with a delicate layer of frost...and by afternoon have warmed enough to be inviting.  

We answer with a hike! Some yoga. some foot-dipping, some pajama-wearing romping through the woods.  (Do you have those days when your child says, but they're the most comfortable thing I have and it's what I want to wear most in the world and you really just can't argue with that? Or you could, but you wonder, what would be the point?)

And now we have a lot of this.  Snuggling. Reading...and reading...and reading...It's Ani's turn for the pox (at last! It really did take another 20 days for number two. I wonder why that is...it's one of the great mysteries to me), and again I am feeling so grateful for a mild case that's just keeping her a little bit quieter than usual, but not much.

Tea parties

Ani is having a long week.  As she expressed to me, It just doesn't seem fair that Eliza was actually sick and she is out doing everything, and I haven't been sick at all, but I couldn't do anything while she was sick and now I still can't do anything! I hear that. And it may turn out that this girl has incredible immunity.  But we are doing what we think is the right thing and hanging in there for the window of contagion (this phrase has grown on me. I may have to draw a window of contagion).

So while Eliza was at homeschool coop yesterday, Ani had a tea party.  I keep thinking it's time to pass on the tea things, and then a major shindig  happens right here in my living room and I see that no, it's not quite time...

Trixie wondering if she is invited?

Everyone is so fancy!

Last night I was slipped a note.  It was an invitation that read:

You are invited to a Fizz Party.  
After breakfast around 10-ish.
Please dress up as if going to a real tea party with someone important because we are important. See you at the Fizz Party. I love you a lot.

As it turned out, our other poxy-hopeful friends were over today for a while and I happily joined the "fizz party" - they served "fizzy juice" (Emergen-C), apple cider and popovers with apple butter. It was delightful.  We all donned our fancy clothes and jewels and sipped our cider through cinnamon sticks and listened to jazz music (the request was for Swan Lake, but I couldn't find it at the moment and settled for Miles Davis).

Everyone was quite polite, sipping their drinks and downing the popovers, and sharing their eyebrow wiggling techniques.  Isn't that what usually happens at tea parties?

And then, after we cleared away the dishes, there was dancing.  Real tea party dancing.  So lovely.

This wasn't such a bad trade-off for missing choir today (Eliza went, but the rest were resting in their Windows.  Of contagion.).  Just a few more days to go...