Karen Kamenetzky Fiber Art

Ever get an amazing idea when you awake that resolves a problem you’d been ruminating about? I awoke yesterday and remembered the bucket of stones from my brook sitting for years in the garage. I had originally used them for dyeing on cotton with fiber reactive:

Life Goes On I

So why not use those wonderfully shaped stones as resists while felting to create cellular craters after the stones were cut out?
If you are someone familiar with wet felting, you probably have already spotted some serious flaws in this plan. Not me.
Even as I laid those stones out on a base surface of prefelt and wool…

rocks on wool

…and even after it became clear that I’d have to try to TIE each stone in place becouse the overlay of Merino wool was not going to hold them during felting…

tied rock resists

…and even after I began suspecting that using my preferred method of wet felting might kill my dryer as it strained to agitate this quite heavy bundle…I persevered. Of course I ended up rolling by hand this lumpy, unwieldy  sausage and couldn’t get it to felt really properly so (in hindsight) cut out the resist stones too soon so there was a bit of further unwanted felting within the craters. Hours later and with an aching back, here was the still wet result:

rock resist result

Not exactly what I envisioned but after all that, I’ll make it work! After dyeing and stitching, I think it might be somewhat usable or even extraordinary. I’m ever the optimist.

This entry was posted on December 29, 2013 at 1:15 pm and is filed under felting, Process. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.