Week 8

For this week, I bought more materials. I bought a wool brush and a Wool Blending Board Carding Brush kit on Amazon.

Last week I bought 100% wool yarn to card out the wool so I can make felted wool. This was 10x the workload than buying felted wool, but it is the cheapest option. I spent about $70 on the wool yarn compared to couple of ounces of wool that cost roughly $24 for 8 ounces depending on the type of wool and company. Even with the discount, it cost about $12-$17/8 ounces. It's about 1 ounce for $3-$5. This isn't a lot of wool to begin with.

I took the white wool yarn and dyed it, but it was a fail. Well, not exactly a fail, but I ruined the wool yarn, but boiling it water with the dye. It felted the wool which made it harder to felt with the needle.

I mixed a dark green and green dye to achieve the green I wanted for my character.

On Monday, I went to my friend's Shannon house with my friend who's going to help me on my project. We created our character. We were still able to use the wool yarn that was felted and still make something out of it. We took the ruined green wool yarn and wrapped it around the armature we made for Sunflower Man. We used dark brown wool from the yarn I carded out to create the head. We needle felted the wool, so the fibers can be felted/binded together. Then we used soap and water to felt the wool together and washed it down with cool running water.

This is the process how we felt the wool so the fibers from the wool can stick.

For the Sunflower Girl, we used the same process, but this time we used a olive green wool roving to create her body and the used the light brown mixed with dark brown to create the head. This offer a bit of contrast to the Sunflower Man.

I also had a bright yellow color for the petals that I dyed. We cut up the shape of the petals and rubbed it on bubble wrap using soap and water to create the shape.

Shannon taught me many different techniques on how to felt wool and if it wasn't for her I wouldn't have known how to use the ruined wool yarn and how I might go about doing so.

These Wool Brushes make it easy to card out the wool and it's easier when using two brushes at the same time.

Wool Blending Board Carding Brush. This made it easier to card out the wool yarn.

This is how the wool yarn turned out.

My dog ate it when I placed it on the table in the backyard to let it dry. She tore his face off, but I was able to felt it back together with needle.