Tutorial: Beginner Needle Felted Christmas Ornaments: Pine Trees on Balls

Merry Christmas, everyone! In my family, we often make each other hand made ornaments as gifts at the holiday times. My tree upstairs is filled with love and memories.

Yes, we have a dog gate around our tree. We have 4 dogs and 2 cats in the house. It just seems prudent. Anyway, most of my family doesn't actually read my blog unless I link to it on my Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/TangibleDaydreams/), so I'm going to take a risk here and let you all have a peek at the needle felted pine tree ornaments I'm making for them this year.

First all, my materials:

Materials:
wool roving
a wool dryer ball
yarn

Tools:
needle felting needles
a bit of foam for a work surface
scissors
a needle for the yarn
needle nose pliers

You can pick up the needle felting needles, needle felting roving, and wool dryer balls off of Amazon. The needle felting needles have tiny barbs on them, which will tangle the fibers of your roving down into the wool of the dryer ball as you gently stab stab stab. You will want at least brown and green roving, though I like having a few shades of each for this project.

 So, take your dark brown roving, and pull a wisp of fibers an inch or so long out from the main mass of wool.

 Twist your brown roving into a straight line. Hmm, the focus isn't very good here. Hard to take pictures without a third hand.

 Anyway, your brown roving will look something like this.

 Take the tip of the line of dark brown, and gently tap it into position with your needle. If you look at the top of the dryer ball, you can see that I have very lightly tacked a random bit of wool into place to mark which way is up. I ended up needle felting three trees onto this ornament, and this helped me place them.

 Tack the brown of your tree trunk very lightly down the line until you get to the bottom. Then, flare out the fibers just a bit to give you a sense of the trunk spreading into roots at the base of the tree.

 Tack the base of your tree into place. You can fold the stray ends of the fiber up into the tree trunk. Double check that you are happy with the placement and length of the trunk. Since you have been tacking very lightly, you can still rip things out at this point.

 Grab a similar wisp of pine green fiber.

 Lay the fiber crosswise, centered on the top of your tree trunk. Needle it to the tree trunk with several stabs up and down the width of the green fiber.

 Now, use the tip of your needle to drag the ends of the green fibers down at an angle, and lightly tack down the end of your branches.

 Do the same on the other side of the tree.

 Grab another wisp of pine green, and add it below the batch that you just did. Again, needle it to the trunk first to anchor it, and then tack down the tips of your branches.

 Move all the way down the tree this way. This gives you the outline of your tree shape. Since everything is still just lightly tacked down, you can still move things around.

 Do you like the general outline? Then it is time to needle felt in earnest. Gently stab stab stab, following along the branches from trunk to tip and back again. Be careful to enter and exit the wool ball at the same angle, or you may snap the tip off of your needle. They are fragile. In the above picture, I've been working on the right side, and not the left, so you can see the difference.

 Ok, you have the skeleton of the tree in place. But there are obviously some bare spots. Grab some more wisps of wool, and tack them into place where you want them. Use the pine green, but maybe also some other colors mixed in as well. I've got some of the lighter green here.

 And maybe some of the various browns scattered here and there might be nice too.

 There, that looks good for me.

 Ok, time to work on the base of the tree. I took another wisp of the dark brown, and tacked its midpoint in at the base of the tree

 Then, dragged the ends of the fibers out sideways and tacked them lightly down to show the ground line.

 I grabbed some of the light brown, and tacked it in below the tree.

 And then, I filled in between the two colors with the medium brown. I left things lightly tacked down on the ground for now...

 ...and then repeated making trees in two other places on my ornament. When I had trees next to each other, I drew the ground fibers toward each other to make a continuous ground line.

 Then I needled the ground fibers firmly down in place.

 Ok, once I had three trees in place, I didn't need my top of the ornament marker any more.

 Since it was just lightly stabbed down a few times, it popped right off.

 To add a loop for hanging, you can use a straight needle if you choose to...

 But I find a curved needle a bit easier to work with. Cut a length of the yarn, thread your sewing needle, and position the yarn at the top of your ornament.

 I find it is easier to use pliers to grab the needle to actually pull the yarn through the wool dryer ball.

 Tie a knot in the top of your yarn to make a loop.

And then, on to the tree it goes!!

You can use this same general idea to add whatever pictures you want onto the dryer balls. I figure my family gets these this year, and I'll see about adding a variety of ornaments to the Etsy shop come holiday time next year. I really liked this process, and want to do more of it!

CSM socks and hat from Serenity yarn

I made a pair of socks today on my antique Creelman Brothers sock knitting machine. This pair is already spoken for. Don't you love the way the color pools and oozes around the sock? This is made from Serenity sock weight yarn from the Deborah Norville collection, from JoAnne's. It is the 'Aquamarine' colorway, and is a very lovely and soft mix of superwash Merino wool, bamboo, and nylon. I hope the recipient has fun with them!

The cool part of today is down in the lower right hand corner of the above picture. I figured out how to use the leftover sock yarn to make baby caps, also on the sock knitting machine. I like the yarns I've been working with so much that I've kept all the bits leftover after making socks. But I haven't really figured out what to do with them yet. I had tentative visions of weaving projects...but baby caps are just about the right size to use up the leftovers. And the yarn is warm, and soft against the skin. I'm thinking that quite a few newborn baby caps may be in my future! If I get going, I'll make some for friends/family, some for the Etsy shop, and maybe some for the local hospitals come winter time.

Tutorial: First try at wool combing

The fleece I washed the other day was dry tonight, so I started experimenting with how to process it for spinning.

The Icelandic sheep's fleece has a longer overcoat, called the tog, and shorter, finer undercoat, called the thel. I'm thinking that I want to take advantage of these two different kinds of fiber. I'd like to use the longer tog for my warp thread, and the shorter thel for the weft. But how to separate it out? Here's the experiment.

First, I pulled at the butt end of the lock, where it was cut off of the sheep. There were some very short fibers there. I pulled those out, and put them in a 'felting' pile.










Then I loaded the butt ends of the locks onto the wool combs, filling about half way up the tines.







Holding the Viking comb in one hand, I brushed the other comb sideways through the locks of wool, first away from me then (carefully!!) towards me. This opened up the locks, and transferred them onto the moving comb.



There was some short nubby wool left on the comb. I pulled that off, and put it in the felt pile. Then I switched the full comb to my left hand, and started the process over again.






After a couple of repeats, the wool looked like this. That is quite a difference from where I started!







I pulled the tips of the wool into a point, and started pulling. I'd pull my fiber out a half inch or so, then move my hand forward and grab from the main bunch again.










This had the effect of pulling out a long, continuous roving. This is ready to spin from now. The current plan is to spin this on a reproduction Medieval drop spindle, worsted style. This should give me a fine, strong warp thread.





I stopped pulling the fibers when the bunch left on the combs were only an inch or so long. I figured that would be the thel that was left there. I pulled that off the combs, and ran it through my carders









Here's the rolag off of the carders. The current plan is to spin this wool on my antique Great or Walking wheel, using the long draw. This should give me a fluffier yarn for my weft.









And that 'felting' pile? When it got big enough, I went to the bathroom sink and made a felt ball for my cats to play with. They love these!

The next step will be to spin up the couple of combs full of wool that I processed this evening, and see what the resulting yarn looks like.

Icelandic fleece and Distaff experiments

I had the day off from modeling, so I decided to start processing the Icelandic fleeces that I got in the mail this past week. (This is the start of a long term historical fiber arts experiment, due next February.) First thing I did was to take one of the fleeces into the back yard, and lay it out to see what condition it was in. To my pleasure, it already been skirted of the worst of the dung. You can see Kaylee here checking it out. She was most confused as to where the rest of the sheep had gotten to.
After checking it out, I grabbed large handfuls of fleece and shook them out. Some vegetable matter and a lot of second cuts fell out. Second cuts are small bits of fiber left from where the shearer had to make a second pass when she was giving the sheep its hair cut. My other dog, Malcolm, was happy to supervise this process. I left the bits of fleece to blow around the back yard and turn to compost, and loosely stuffed the rest into lingerie bags.


I brought the bags of fleece inside, and set them to soak for 10 minutes in my washing machine on hot, with a squirt of Dawn. Soak only--no agitation! I only wanted to remove dirt and grease, not make felt. I used the spin cycle on the machine to remove the water, took out the bags, and refilled the machine with plain hot water. The bags went back in to soak for another 10 minutes. I repeated that two more times before the water finally ran clear, and there was no residue left on the inside of the machine. Then the fleece went on a rack to dry for a couple of days.


In the mean time, I've been experimenting with the Medieval spindle that I put together last night. It is kind of wobbly, and doesn't spin for as long as my modern spindles do. I poked around the web for a bit, and found that this is the nature of the beast--because it was made to be used with a distaff. If you look here: http://www.larsdatter.com/spinning.htm you'll find loads of period illuminations of the spindle in use, and almost every one of them uses a distaff. One hand stays up near the fiber source to draft out the fibers, and the other hand usually hovers an inch or so above the spindle. I went back out into the yard and cut a stick for a makeshift distaff, and tried it out.

This actually worked pretty well. Within minutes, my hands were in the same position as the spinners in the manuscripts. I could park the stick with the fiber under my arms, or use my legs to brace it, and pull right from the source. The distaff keeps it under control (this will be great when spinning outside on a windy day!), and the fiber stays neat instead of getting wadded up in my hand. And with my right hand so near the spindle, I can flick it every 5 or so seconds and keep it moving. This gives me good control over the speed of the twist. Keeping control of the spindle will take some learning, though. I lost track of the number of times I accidentally undid the half hitch around the top of the stick and dropped the whole thing.

I'm thinking I don't have the notch in the top of the twig carved correctly, which is why the yarn is coming undone. And I'm also a little worried about the fact that this spindle whorl is made of lead. Lead poisoning is bad. To fix both of these issues, I've ordered a pewter reproduction Medieval spindle from the Woolery, here: http://www.woolery.com/ . It looks very similar to my actual artifact. We'll see how it works when it gets here.

Anyway, I found that the stick I was using for a distaff was also kind of poky, a little rough, and slightly curved in a way that made it harder to feed fiber from one side. So I hunted around for a 'real' distaff. I only found them for sale at Dragonfly Farms, and they were a little out of my price range right now. I thought for a bit...then went out to JoAnne's and bought a two piece wooden flag pole and a small step stool. My husband drilled a hole in the stool. I wound the wool roving around the top of the flag pole, and tied it down with a lucet cord I had lying around.



So far, this is working. When all three pieces are together, I have a self supporting distaff for when I'm sitting in a chair. And I can unscrew just the top half to tuck under my arm when I want to spin while walking around. I think I'm going to cut about 6 inches off the bottom pole though, as I'm feeling some arm strain reaching up so high to draft out the fibers.

I'm having great fun trying to puzzle this out. Here's to experimental archeology!

A treasure trove

I was camping this weekend at an SCA event, when a dear friend who knows of my fiber interests gave me a hand written treasure map. At X marks the spot, there were 4 lawn sized garbage bags to be found. My husband and I left the camping event, and went hunting.

We came back with the 4 bags. The next day, we started dividing them up. One bag was broken open, and shared out amongst about a half a dozen folks still on site. One bag went up north to Ered Sul, the Flagstaff chapter of the SCA, to be parted out there. The other two came home with me, and are in the picture above.

What was in these bags?


Wool! Lots and lots of wool, straight off of the sheep. The story goes that these are either from Rambouilett or Suffolk sheep (probably not full breed). There was someone in the area who raised the sheep, but decided not to sell or use the wool this year. When they sheared the sheep, they simply bagged the wool up and put it out for the garbage man. Their neighbor rescued it, put it at their own curb, and told my friend in the SCA about it. My friend dashed out, squished two bags into her car (to be taken down to southern AZ and divided up amongst fiber artists there), and realized she didn't have room for the rest. So she wrote out the treasure map, and sent me on my quest. Whee!

Today I broke into my two bags, and skirted the 5 fleeces that I found inside. I'm going to keep the brown fleece, and one of the white fleeces. The other three got put into 4 bags, and will go to new homes before too long.


Isn't this beautiful stuff? Looks like I'm going to be spending the next couple of days washing fleece!

(If you are local to Phoenix, and would like some wool, let me know. Two of the four bags are already spoken for, but that leaves two more people who could share in the bounty.)

EDIT: The bags are spoken for. Now lots of people get to play, too!