Thursday, January 24, 2008

NOT felt and giving it all the birds



As you may recall from reading yesterday's post, I was going along thinking I had this whole felt thing under control, that I was going to be able to get started on finishing up the project, etc., etc., etc.

Well, NOT

While each of the pieces of knitting came out of the wash/dry cycle having shrunk, they are NOT felt

what the ...???

Now I'm in the "what happened and how do I fix it?" mode -- the last bit of felting went just fine. I put the chunk of knitting and/or wool fabric in the pillow case in the washer with the same jeans and they all came out beautifully felted.

So, is it that the pieces were too small? Should I put them all in one bag, not individual ones? Is the water not as hot? (We've had the whole water heater issue in the interim, we'll not dwell on that here.) Was there not enough agitation? (Although I can tell you, I was plenty agitated when they were not felt!)

So, its back to the drawing board on this one. The DH suggested trying the process with boiling water in a dish pan in the sink, but I have no idea how to do that since I know that felting usually requires agitating the fibers too and I'm not sticking my hands in boiling water, thank you!

nuts!



meantime, we had to go off on our last ever long distance Costco run -- our shiny new Costco will be opening (less than 2 miles away!) on Feb 21, so our next run will be after our next payday to that location.

While in the car for this trip, however, I finished stitching up the dark toucan.

So, now both of the toucans I had planned to have ready for the show in April are ready to be stuffed and finished. Yeah!!

Next bird on the block is the first every puffin -- we'll see how that goes.

off to the coup!

1 comment:

Nancy G said...

"DH suggested trying the process with boiling water in a dish pan in the sink, but I have no idea how to do that since I know that felting usually requires agitating the fibers too and I'm not sticking my hands in boiling water, thank you!"

I've read of using a clean plunger (plumber's helper) to do the felting by hand. Another thought...I wonder if you could get enough agitation with that OJ-concentrate-squishing potato masher?