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felt jar

My friend Laura has just opened a new Etsy shop called felt jar, featuring her wonderful, whimsical felted things. Her items are all 100% wool that have been either needle or wet-felted. Right now in her shop you can find owls, ladybugs, ornaments, acorns, pincushions, gnomes and other felted treasures.

If you’re not familiar with needle felting, it’s a labor-intensive process that involves painstakingly shaping and punching wool roving with a sharp needle hundreds (maybe thousands) of times to create dense felt shapes. Wet felting involves immersing the felt into hot water and forming shapes by molding it with your hands. Felting isn’t easy and it’s even harder on your hands.

Laura is also the photographer for my upcoming book for Chronicle Books, which explains why her photographs are so beautiful. You’d better hurry over and take a look now before her shop is sold out!

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Bag it. Tag it.

Happy Holidays?! I know it’s early, but get started now and relax when the holidays are finally here.

Here’s a quick drawstring bag and wooden chalkboard tag that you can reuse for a thrifty and eco-friendly holiday. I opted for simple, but you could change up the fabric, or use a satin ribbon or rick-rack trim for the drawstring. Two buttonholes on the front of the bag allow the string to hang in the front and the drawstring casing is created by simply sewing a channel in the outer and lining fabrics. These would be simple to make in many different sizes for all of your holiday gifts.

Click on the image below to print out the full instructions.

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Rainy Day Gocco

I had a not-really-sick kid home with me yesterday, so we did some gocco printing for the upcoming ICE holiday show.

When printing on fabric, I use the gocco just to burn the screen, then use the screen just like a mini-silkscreen with fabric ink. I seem to get much more even results this way and may try this method printing on paper as well. Anyway, the top drawing was made by my five-year-old and the jellyfish was made by my seven-year-old. Jellyfish are her current obsession. I think these will get made into zippered pouches, maybe painted too.

We’re also planning to make some jellyfish ornaments. No turtle doves for us, we’ll be celebrating the holidays with chickens and jellyfish. Why not?

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