Announcing 1-day Beginner and Intermediate silk painting workshops at my home studio!

March 24th and June 9th: Start Silk Painting Today!

Beginner workshop, no experience or artistic ability required. With flowing dyes and brilliant colors you’ll learn how to create beautiful art (even if you think you have no talent)! You’ll learn the basic silk painting technique of drawing with resist and painting with dyes, and create a small scarf to take home. ($95, supplies included)

Thanks for reading and email me with any questions!

My nuno felted chiffon scarf

I couldn’t help myself – I just had to answer the question “What if”? What if I embellished my nuno felted scarf  from the previous post with some yarn? I just happened to have this great ball of fuzzy, multicolored yarn that I thought would go well the teal and yellow in my scarf. Isn’t it scrumptious?

Fun yarn!

Instead of stitching, I wanted to see if I could attach it with another form of felting – hand needle felting. In needle felting, sharp, barbed needles are used to push the fibers from a top layer through the fibers of the bottom layer. There are machines that do this but I only have the hand version – a group of 3 needles, shown here.

Small hand felting needle

I place the yarn on the scarf and push the needles in and out, forcing the yarn fibers through the scarf. My base is something like a big overturned brush, which allows me to push the needles down through the scarf.

Needle felting yarn into my scarf

And here’s the result. The yarn is firmly attached with no stitching and the silk ‘frilled’ even more.

Nuno felted silk scarf embellished with needle felted yarn

Yarn needle felted to scarf

Here’s the back side. I won’t say ‘wrong’ side, because I think it looks just as interesting as the front, just in a different way.

Back of scarf, showing where the yarn fibers pushed through the silk

I think I like the answer to my “What if?” question!

A couple of Fridays ago the Piedmont Silk Painters got together to learn a technique that was new to most of us – nuno felting. In our version, we were going to use pre-dyed silk chiffon scarves as a base, adding wool fibers (roving) to the scarves and felting the fibers together. In a nutshell, what happens in felting is that the silk and wool fibers interlock with each other, forming a new fabric. Sound intriguing? Read on!

Please note that this isn’t meant to be a thorough ‘how-to’: for more in-depth information, check out Terri Pike’s felting videos and Leslie Owens’ website.

Piedmont Silk Painters group meeting

Teaching us was Joanna White (at head of table), one of our members who has some nuno felting experience.  We are in Marcia Ferris’s studio, our usual meeting place.

Joanna White's nuno felted scarf

This is one of Joanna’s exquisite nuno felted chiffon scarves. The ruched (pleated) areas are where white and blue roving has been felted to the silk.

Now for a demo from Joanna ~

Nuno felting demo - placing roving on scarf

The silk is laid out on bubble wrap. Joanna shreds pieces of roving into wisps and lays them on the scarf. They are laid first in one direction and then the other, so they overlap.

Chiffon scarf with roving added

This is my project at that stage. It’s a chiffon scarf that I did a shibori design on ((the horizontal stripes) that I didn’t like. Plus I accidentally cut a hole in it! It’s been languishnig in my closet awaiting an idea of what to do with it. Nuno felting seemed like the perfect solution!

You can see wisps of teal and yellow roving criss-crossing each other. Crossing the fibers over each other over ensures better bonding.

This is Christie’s scarf. She laid roving all around her edges (underneath and and top of the silk) because her silk had raw edges that she wanted to hide.

Felting wool and silk fibers

After all the roving is laid down, the scarf is covered with a mesh screen and warm soapy water made with olive oil soap is rubbed in. This causes initial bonding  felting of wool fibers to themselves and to the silk. This is the basic felting process. The screen is then removed.

Rolling felted silk into a tube

Next, scarf and bubble wrap are rolled together  into a tube on a PVC rod. Here’s Marcia rolling hers.

Rolling and rolling the tube

Now for the heavy action! The tubes are rolled back and forth 100 times. We’re trying to maximise friction so our whole body is thrown into this. It’s quite a workout! But we’re not done yet – the tube is then unrolled, the scarf flipped and rubbed again with soapy water. Then rolled on the PVC rod again (this time from the opposite direction to the first time), and body-rolled again for another 100 times. Can you hear us panting? (That’s Marcia’s husband video taping)!

After this we unroll the tube and again wet it with hot soapy water and rub rub rub. By now the silk and wool are good and married, but to cement the union, we crumple the scarf and whack it. I mean we literally fling the crumpled scarf repeatedly into the sink as hard as we could to further agitate and interlock the fibers. This is called fulling. This was a good time to fling any frustration or anger away together with the silk! I couldn’t get photos of this – it was too fast!

The final step is rinsing well to remove all soap then opening our poor, beat-up bundles to reveal our new creations.

Our felted and fulled scarves

And here are the results of our effort and sweat! The silk has shrunk and pleated where the wool and silk fibers bonded, forming folds and wrinkles. The frilly edges are areas where there was no roving and so no felting and shrinking. Very, very cool!

Nuno felting detail

Nuno felting detail

You can see the pleating better here. The pleats are permanent (I know – I tried pulling them apart just for fun but they wouldn’t budge!) and there’s no stitching, just fibers interlocked together. Magic!

Piedmont Silk Painters with our felted scarves

A good time was had by all and  here we are with our scarves to prove it!

Want to learn nuno felting from the pros? Check out these workshops offered at the SPIN (Silk Painters International) Festival in Santa Fe this July!

My husband walked into my studio and saw me deep in thought, wondering what color to paint in the white spaces with. I had been thinking golden yellow to contrast with the purple. He said, “Just leave it white”! White? I’m so attuned to color that it rarely occurs to me to leave anything white! I always feel compelled to answer the question, “What would it look like with X color”? But he begged me, just for once, to consider white a color and leave it alone! So I did. I actually like it! What do you think?

Since I had fun creating a design from scribbles drawn with my resist bottle for my last scarf, I decided to do it again, using my favorite color combination, purple and teal. Here’s the border – the resist is drawn in a continuous line of waves and loops.

More curves and loops cover the inside. I’m drawing and painting in small sections, trying to paint in the areas while the resist is still wet and more visible. When it dries it really disappears into the silk. In the previous scarf, I had forgotten about the disappearing trick, and I did all the resist drawing at one time. When it came time to paint, with the resist totally dry, I had to put my head at all kinds of angles for the light to hit my resist line just right, so I could see it! I’ve learnt my lesson now.

I’m not sure yet what my third color will be… I’ll decide when I’ve finished this step of painting.

To fill in the scarf I scribbled with resist in a curvy, loopy freehand design. I alternated purple and brick dyes for the main areas and green for the little ‘buds’. I left some of these white to make it look like they were floating on top of everything.

I think that mere scribbling produced a pretty interesting design! Next step is setting the dyes.
 

Last year scarves were my bread and butter and so I plan to paint lots of them again this year. I’m using resist on this one, and have started by drawing a double border with wavy curves and loops. I plan to fill the inside with more curves and loops…

 Another layer of background color…

In the this and subsequent layers, because I painted wet dye over dry, unset dye, the different layers interacted and formed various spontaneous organic shapes, which lend themselves to the abstract, dreamy sort of look I’m going after.

… and here is ‘Branching Out, 12 x 9 in. Dyes and resist on silk.

Mounted on gallery wrap stretched canvas.

I’m starting off the new year with a painting of one of my favorite types of flowers – orchids – which I love because of their infinite variety of form and color.

Here’s the first step (sorry for the fuzzy photos!) – a branch of cattleya orchids, outlined with resist and painted with magenta petals and gold throats. This is probably all the resist work I’m going to do – the rest will be an abstract background which I think I’ll do in a couple of layers. I want the whole to piece to look almost abstract, so I’m being scant on details.

A little background color added, making sure that for harmony I included the same colors I used in the flowers. More background to follow.

To get you into a 2012 frame of mind, this video has a beautiful new year’s prayer by Charlotte Anselmo and Auld Land Syne sung by Sissel. Not to mention stunning photography. Enjoy!