Category: felting

Antique Shop Bargain!

Ridged rolling pin "for oats", perfect for felting!

Today we popped into Fanny’s Antiques (in a side road near TGI Friday’s, Reading), and picked up a couple of lovely things.

The first lovely thing I can’t show you, and I have to forget about immediately, because it’s going to be my Christmas present. Suffice it to say that it’s a small piece of furniture, and sewing is involved. I’ll show you in December, once I’ve remembered to be surprised by it!

The second lovely thing is the rolling pin pictured above. Labelled as being “for oats”, it’s going to be absolutely perfect for working with felt! Half the price of buying one from Wingham Wool Work, too.

It turns out I’ve also saved myself the grand sum of £9.50 by not buying a fulling block – I discovered that a grooved wooden soap dish does the same job! One felting gadget that I do want to buy though is a bulb spray. That will allow me to use water that’s hotter than my hands are able to tolerate through the plastic bottle I’m using at the moment. It should also hopefully be a bit more controlled.

Once we’ve moved house, there’s a convenient-looking work surface next to the sink in the new kitchen, so I’m hoping I can get the felting stuff out while the sewing machines and fabric are still packed away. I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do with my new rolling pin!

Felted slippers – part two

Too big!

Awww. They’re too big! I knew the lasts would be quite roomy around the top, and I do plan to cut these away to more of a ballet pump shape. But still. Too big.

Too big!

Look how much room there is in front of my toes! The lasts were a size 38/39, but I’d say these have come out around a 40/41. I did toy with the idea of chucking them in the washing machine, to take the hard work out of shrinking them a little bit more, but was so worried about them coming out the right size to fit my two year old niece that I decided against. (Not that I begrudge her a pair of pink felted slippers, but I want these to be mine!)

Soles and insoles

So, I went back to my long-neglected shoemaking supplies, and have given them rubber soles along with cork-and-fleece insoles. These are now sitting on the deck waiting to dry, while I’m recovering from the fumes from the glue. Wow, that stuff is disgusting. Even wearing a respirator and eye protection, you can still smell it a bit, and it still makes my eyes water. That, along with the terrifying health and safety warnings, makes me think that there must be a better solution than glue. I mean, what’s the point of painstakingly hand crafting a pair of slippers from natural materials… and then whacking four layers of highly toxic rubber cement all over them?

They do need some kind of sole though. On laminate flooring and tiles they’re slippery enough to be absolutely lethal, and of course without soles they can’t be worn outside. Time to go back to my shoemaking books (and maybe a few museums with non-leather shoes?) to come up with some more ideas.

Lots and lots of tea bags...

Meanwhile… this is the scene in my kitchen at the moment. Remember I said I was going to take all my frozen tea bags out of the freezer, to make room for ice cubes? Well, I did that, and I left them all out on a table in the garden to dry overnight. Except that, for the first time in weeks and weeks, it rained. It rained A LOT. So now they’re on the kitchen table, drying off again.

I have no idea whether they’ll have any dyeing properties left whatsoever, after the amount of water that landed on them last night! Hopefully they’ll still leave at least a little trace. I’m still not entirely sure what I’m going to dye with them yet, but after a few experiments with the leftovers in the tea urn filled with assam, I’m thinking it needs to be silk for the best results. Which is the one thing, of course, that I don’t have a great deal of in my fabric stash! I might need to make a bit of extra room by sewing up some of the cottons first…