Silk Marbling with Laura Sims

Back in July I took a workshop with Laura Sims at my good friend Linda Veilleux's studio. Linda's studio is in her lovely Vermont home and she offers some workshops as retreats; with rooms and food for a small extra charge that is REALLY worth it. It is so much fun and more relaxing to be able to stay where you are, work longer if desired, and just hang out with new friends. I have been thinking about offering classes here with a room for overnight too, but I could not do what Linda does with pampering her guests with food and treats (plus I really don't like planing meals). I also don't have such a nice studio space or this gorgeous view...

I have wanted to learn marbling for a very long time. I remember going to a program at one of my children's elementary schools where the kids were able to do some marbling on paper. I really wanted to try it too. Years later I learned more about it in my favorite class at Smith, The Art and History of the Book. I even bought some supplies for marbling when I started dyeing my own silks for felting. But what finally got me to do it was seeing Laura's work, which goes beyond the traditional patterns and lends it self to nuno felting. At a guild meeting Linda showed us this coat that she had made with silk that Laura had created.

When I was at the Felter's Fling last year, I had also seen this beautiful jacket by Elynn Bernstein which was made with some of Laura's silk .



I did not take many photos at the workshop; I really just wanted to relax and not be distracted by trying to remember to take pictures to share. Laura shared so much information with us, not just about how to marble silk. She has so many handy tips of how to make tools on the cheap that she could teach a class just in that. This is the kind of frugal thinking that I grew up with and I felt an instant kinship with Laura. Here she shows a straining funnel for the paint and a silk 'handle' that are made easily with items from around the house.

And here is one of her clever drying racks.

Here is a photo showing a dedicated student taking advantage of being able to work after class hours and how elaborate the set up was. Laura really has a lot of work before and after a class like this.

Here are some of my samples of the techniques Laura taught us. She showed us so many that I did not even get around to trying some of them! I hope I can remember enough to try them when I have time.

Along with learning more traditional marbling we learned to do "scapes. This is something I really want to explore more. I did get one of ocean waves that I love.

 We were getting some wonderful textures that Laura thought might be attributed to the water we were using.
One of the exercises was to lay down colored strips of fabric to see how differently the same paint looks on different colored backgrounds.

Here you can see by the way the fabric overlapped just what the color was before the marbling.

With the help of my friend Jean Gauger I made a scarf that I was proud of. It is was made using a Spanish wave pattern where the paint is pushed down the length of the tray as the fabric is moved back and forth. Jean and I had to try to get our movements to match as she held one end and we slowly laid the fabric down in the tray.

And here is a scarf by a master...

Here are some of my samples made into small bags. Making these was a good way to find out what patterns and color combinations work in nuno felt.

The Dreaded Wool Moth

When I was feeling so discouraged about felting, I had the additional fright of seeing what I thought was a wool/clothes moth in my upstairs studio. Then, when I was cleaning in the basement I thought I saw two...or three? This is such a big fear for those of us who have huge stashes of wool and other natural fibers. The very thought of it was so overwhelming to me that I wanted to throw everything away and be done with fiber. Having to look in all my bins of wool; hoping, yet fearing to find where the greatest infestation was; possibly having to throw out so much money in wool was all way more than I could handle at that time. I put it off for a week or two but finally decided to peek in one bin. No moths or anything that looked like the eggs or casings I was seeing in images on the internet. But there was some dirt and dusty stuff in the bottom of the bin. Could that be the eggs? I decided to go to the best resource of all things having to do with felt Pat Spark's Feltmaker's List and ask questions about how to go about my hunt. The information was not quite as definite as would have liked so when I found my 'problem' I thought I would take photos to show just what an infestation can look like.
Before I show the nastiness I want to share some information about the little buggers. First off, clothes moths (Tineola bisselliella and Tinea pellionella) aka webbing clothes moths and casemaking clothes moths...

  should not be confused with Indian meal moths (Plodia interpunctella) .

The clothes moth wants your natural fibers especially that yummy wool. Indian meal moths (Mom always called them 'millers') want your cereal and crackers and flour and chocolate and dried fruit and dried flowers and spices and...well, you get the idea.
I was quite familiar with the meal moths, as Mom often had a nice crop of them. After I moved in here I went on the attack to get rid of them and discovered that although the pantry and kitchen cupboards had been cleaned of the pests, they had set up camp in other places such as in the dried flowers that Mom used for crafts and in old, unused spices. The meal moths are bigger and darker in color than the clothes moths are. They are pretty easy to catch as they fly (I remember the cats loved getting them). The clothes moths flit too fast to get them and seem much more desperate to hide from the light than the meal moths.
 I tried to catch any little moths I saw without squashing them too much so I could try to make the positive identification that what I was seeing was in fact a clothes moth. It can be hard in the heat of the moment not to smash them into dust! Those that were still whole-ish I looked at with a magnifier to see the head. That is what I found  to be the best way to differentiate between the two, since the body size and color can vary so much. In the photos above you can see that the clothes moth has a fuzzy head. The moth that I had found in my upstairs studio had a smooth dark head and was actually just a very pale and small meal moth. When I looked at him with a loupe I could faintly see the stripe on his wings too.
I went through all my bins of wool upstairs just to be sure that there was nothing lurking anyway. I refreshed the sachets of lavender while I was at it. One thing I discovered in my research is that all those scents and oils such as cedar might make your wool less attractive to the bugs but to really be noxious to them it would have to be in such concentrations as to be noxious to us too. And the traps for both the meal moths and the clothes moths only catch the males so they do diminish the population but mainly serve as a way to monitor the situation, because by the time you see one or two of them you really have a nasty invasion somewhere.
My somewhere was down in the basement. The little buggers were in some scrap wool that I had in a felt bowl, and in a bag of locks from a fleece that I had cleaned. The felt bowl was in a dark corner of the studio and not put away in the cupboard where I keep my wool bins. The bin with the locks had also been out of the cupboard. The moths prefer dirty wool and the locks had not been washed too much as I wanted them for my natural rug felting. The scrap wool was mainly wool that had been dyed with natural dyes. There is much more helpful information on the internet than I can include here so it is a good idea to look at sites such as this one from Cornell and this one from Colorado State University.
Here are my photos of the moths, casings, frass (aka bug poop which can be any color depending on what color wool they are eating), and eggs. Here is what I found in the felt bowl.

 And here is what the bag of fleece looked like.

I hope this gives you a good idea of what to look for if you ever have to go on the dreaded wool moth hunt. (Sorry about the type in the photos but I am too antsy to go back and fix it now.)
By the way, I left the scrap wool outside for the birds as nest material. I am using the freeze thaw cycle for the fleece. And I plan on washing the the felt to try to save it though thankfully it was not a treasure.
Next up a post on a fantastic marbling workshop I took with the wonderful Laura Sims.

Time to come out of hiding

I am getting back to a place where I care enough about art and felting to feel like I can blog again. It has been rough ever since one of my meds was changed to generic. My cognitive functioning and memory were so bad I decided I would rather be depressed or manic. As a last ditch effort to not do a total med change the good doctor wrote a script for name brand only and I think it is working. (I now spend a third of my income for meds but at least I CAN pay.)
For this post I am just going to share a few things that I have been able to do since I last wrote. Most of all I worked outside. Being outdoors is the best remedy for me when life seems too hard. In March I started building a stick fence around my vegetable garden to keep the chickens out. I got the idea from seeing my friend Cheryl Christner's stick fence last August. I had been pruning the fruit trees and thought the trimmings would work for the fence. It would also keep me from adding to the brush pile which had grown huge since clearing out around the barn and our "Snowtober" storm. I made it my goal to only use materials that were either invasive or needed trimming anyway. It started like this...

using sumac and the fruit tree trimmings (the sumac actually started to sprout as the weather warmed). I only had enough of those materials to do that side of the garden. So I needed to change my design as I turned the corner (I also get bored too fast to do the same design over and over). For the next section I added more curves and hearts, now adding choke cherry that had been damaged in the snow storm (that sprouted too). 

Next I built a gate...with a chicken design in the center. I found a grapevine tendril that was perfect for the eye...

 Then I decided to use up some of the drier brush...kind of like a vertical brush pile. Now when I find sticks on the lawn I can just stick them in the fence!

Then another gate...this time made with old junk wood from in the barn.

By the time I got to the next corner the pussy willows had finished blooming so I went ahead and cut the broken branches. Willow is one of the traditional materials to use for weaving and I can see why. It was such a joy to work with I decided I wanted to tackle making an archway for the next gate.This is the start of it...

Once the garden got growing and the weather got so hot I stopped working on the fence. I hope to finish it in the fall. In the mean time I am enjoying the fruits of my labor (sadly so are the bugs, and I will not use petrochemicals to stop them so not much squash this year).

During this time I had a few things happen which caused me to have a lot of negative feelings about felting, one of which I will go into detail about in my next post. (Hint: it is a common fear of wool lovers). The only other creative thing I did was to play with my pastels, which I had not touched in years. I am pleased that I finished the picture even though I am not all that happy with the results.

Really, to get the results I want would take more colors and a lot more practice with the medium. BUT happily my oldest sister came to visit last month and said something that got me to go back to felting, a medium I feel more confident with. She told me not to stop felting because "there is too much talent here to waste". I had not thought about it in that way before. Thanks again Fran!

Now time to get to work...

Felted Landscape Class at New England Felting Supply

I had a great class at NEFS this past weekend. I had only three students so I was able to relax a bit and really give extra time to each individual. I felt bad for the store since it was probably losing money with the class; which would normally be cancelled with less than four participants, but it was a boon to the participants with lots of room to work and extra attention. It was interesting that though there was a poor turnout for the class I received 3 inquiries that week from folks wanting to take my class. I am working up a cost for students to come here for private lessons to accommodate those who cannot get to the other classes. I think this will be really beneficial to the students as they will have my wools and embellishments to work with plus all that one-on-one time. I may even offer an overnight guest room....we will see.

I have realized that I need to write a better explanation of what I teach since my current class description is a  "just the facts Mam", bare bones blurb. So I thought I would do a write up here that can be pared down for advertising. 

The class is like a mini art class about landscape painting, we just happen to be working in wool creating felt. For me this hybrid felt is very much like the process I was doing when illustrating. The wet felting gives the look of the watercolor under-paintings that I started the illustrations with. I would then further develop and add detail to the piece with colored pencil which in this case is the needle felting. I start the class with a long (I try not to be too long winded) lecture about the basics of rendering a landscape; things that would apply to any colored medium. I teach how our use of color, value, line, and perspective can give a great sense of depth to a painting. I discuss how to look at the inspirational photo and break it down into simplified masses and how to truly see what is there. My greatest wish is for students to leave with a new way of seeing. I then talk about how the use of wool and various fibers and the felting techniques can be used to create something very unique in landscape rendering. The felt itself is more than just a flat canvas; the surface of the felt can be built up much more than if we were just using layers of paint. Students do the wet felting on the first day and then make changes and add details with the felting needle on the second day. Students may not leave with a finished piece but they have the basic knowledge of how to render a landscape.

Here are the pieces created this past weekend. Since there are only three pieces to show I will include shots of the layouts as well. First up is a fall scene done by James.

The layout

after wet felting

 at the end of class

Here is Melinda's. It is a scene of the Italian cliff city of Manarola....a difficult subject for a first landscape, I am hoping to see a photo of it after she does more needling to add straight lines to the buildings and cliffs.

the reference photo

the layout

after wet felting

at the end of class

And here is Marybeth's. A familiar scene for her as it is part of her property.

the layout

after wet felting

at the end of class

Though teaching always makes me want to create a piece of my own I felt I had too many other projects in the works to indulge that desire. However I did FINALLY finish the rug that I had started laying out way back during the end of November. We had a beautiful 70 degree day so I took it outside and danced on it to finish felting it. It is not really felted as hard as can be but it is not going to fall apart either and I want to move on. Here it is in the living room so you can get an idea of the size. I am not sure where it will live yet....maybe in my bedroom where I can get out of bed in the morning and sink my toes in the soft locks. :)

Another Month Gone By

I was surprised to see that it has been a whole month since I last posted on my blog. I wish I could say that that was because I had been having such a good and productive time that the month just flew. Unfortunately it has been a struggle for me with another dip into the pit of depression due in part to a switch in meds from one drug manufacturer to another. Along with the depression was a good dose of apathy so I didn't even care enough to try to fix things. I didn't believe that the switch could really be causing that much trouble but when I took some of the old pills that I had in my travel bag I felt much better. I was even able to tackle some jobs that have been hanging over my head, like figuring out my insurance to pay for those meds. That whole thing is so complicated that I feel like I need a medical adviser, much like a financial adviser who can read AND understand all that paper work and then tell me my best options. It is hard enough to figure out with a mind that is working well. (I hope I don't sound too whiny since I do often think of those who have health problems that are so much worse than mine).
Since it HAS been so long since I posted I am just going to give a brief gloss of the "highlights". (Thank goodness for my photography or I would not remember any of it). First the felt-y things.
My sister Beth wanted to make another landscape so she and I had a nice day of playing felt with her. Here is the piece she made; it is not done yet.

I started this; it is not done either.

 I hosted another Felt-Together for friends but since Joei wanted to make a landscape I kept my invitee list short. Here is the piece that Joei started.

 Robin brought her piece and did a bit more needle felting on it.

Sadly, I didn't get a photo of the project that Cheryl Christner was working on. I just kind of played with a few different things. These little blocks are for a guild project.

And I sampled some new wool, yarns, and fabric.

One of the new wools was from Lisa Merian of Spinner's Hill. This wonderful woman offered to donate the proceeds from the sale of some special wool to a fund created for fellow guild member Linda Van Alstyne. Linda is battling a rare form of cancer; adenoid cystic carcinoma. The wool was dyed in Linda's favorite color and was perfect for making some fall leaves. They will get some beading, and stitching and be turned into pins.

Before I hosted a Felt-Together again I made another improvement to my 'studio' arrangement. I came up with an idea of how to hang my pieces so I could see them without really changing the dining room too much. After seeing my things hanging on the wall of Robin's studio I realized how much more motivated I would be to finish some of my pieces if I could see them hanging instead of packed in a UFO box. I hung a big piece of purchased felt over the china cabinets and can pin the pieces up. It will be easy to take down and store when holiday time comes again. 

One of the pieces was one that I finally finished so maybe this idea will work. I finished the beading on this old piece.

I spent a lot of the last month outside since I find working outdoors to be very healing. Dad calls it my dirt therapy. The barn project is still going on and now that the roof is done it was time to bring in fill for the inside. That meant moving some of the wood that was still in there...a lot of wood. Dad did much of it but gave himself a hernia moving some of it so I called in the family to help and we got it done. Now it decorates the yard.  I think we could build a new shed with all of that.

 The dump truck in the background is actually stuck. So Dad got a change to drive it while it's owner was dragging it with the skid-steer. I think he had fun!