any day you get to use tongs and wear rubber gloves is a good day
Working on felting a trial covering for one of those lamps.
Noted so far:
- my kitchenware is not up to the task of doing one ball at a time; most of the problem seems to be getting several quarts of water up to an initial boil. Especially if we want 24 of them. I may need to get a ginormous stock pot to do several at a time. And make smaller balls to run tests if this doesn't work on the first shot. I long for a washing machine.
- It's a good thing we want white wool for this piece, because I'm trying it with blue wool and the water is leaching the dye. If trying to felt colored wool, it would be wise to throw in more dye and mordant at the same time. (Or boil them in vinegar, if I wanted to make my entire building uninhabitable.)
I'm done. The first ball, the one I took a picture of last week, didn't work at all -- the felt just slid completely off and felted into a stringy pale blue mass in the water. I didn't want to waste all the hot water, so I quickly re-covered the smaller ball (steel wire, not aluminum) in some of the new wool (the other stuff was superwash. DOH), needle-felted a couple of patches just to bolt them on, and wrapped it in heavy thread before tossing it in. That one looks much happier, though I'm sure it's now falling apart structurally because it was only held together with electrical tape. It is saggy and wet and resembles your proverbial wet blanket, but notably closer to spherical. The texture is lovely. It took up some of the blue dye.
I had 2 ounces of white wool to begin with, and I split the whole hank longitudinally twice and used half of that, so it seems like 1/2 oz. of wool on a 3" ball gets you quite a thick covering. No idea what it will do with light.
I hear that knitted items shrink more or less evenly as they felt. Boiling does interesting things: it seems to expand in any direction you allow it to expand in (already-plied and knitted yarn is presumably under a lot of internal tension), but also shrink as the fibers compress. I'm not sure what this thing will do when it's dry.
This works great:
This, not so much:
Noted so far:
- my kitchenware is not up to the task of doing one ball at a time; most of the problem seems to be getting several quarts of water up to an initial boil. Especially if we want 24 of them. I may need to get a ginormous stock pot to do several at a time. And make smaller balls to run tests if this doesn't work on the first shot. I long for a washing machine.
- It's a good thing we want white wool for this piece, because I'm trying it with blue wool and the water is leaching the dye. If trying to felt colored wool, it would be wise to throw in more dye and mordant at the same time. (Or boil them in vinegar, if I wanted to make my entire building uninhabitable.)
I'm done. The first ball, the one I took a picture of last week, didn't work at all -- the felt just slid completely off and felted into a stringy pale blue mass in the water. I didn't want to waste all the hot water, so I quickly re-covered the smaller ball (steel wire, not aluminum) in some of the new wool (the other stuff was superwash. DOH), needle-felted a couple of patches just to bolt them on, and wrapped it in heavy thread before tossing it in. That one looks much happier, though I'm sure it's now falling apart structurally because it was only held together with electrical tape. It is saggy and wet and resembles your proverbial wet blanket, but notably closer to spherical. The texture is lovely. It took up some of the blue dye.
I had 2 ounces of white wool to begin with, and I split the whole hank longitudinally twice and used half of that, so it seems like 1/2 oz. of wool on a 3" ball gets you quite a thick covering. No idea what it will do with light.
I hear that knitted items shrink more or less evenly as they felt. Boiling does interesting things: it seems to expand in any direction you allow it to expand in (already-plied and knitted yarn is presumably under a lot of internal tension), but also shrink as the fibers compress. I'm not sure what this thing will do when it's dry.
This works great:
This, not so much: