Make a Felted Garland!

1. Introduction: Hey, Dre. I'm Eliza with Ancestral Evolution. And today, I'm going to be teaching you how to make your very own fun belted garland. These things are great for basically any holidays, special occasions, baby showers, birthdays, pretty much anything. You can customize your colors and your shapes and create something that is gorgeous and unique for your event. I'm a fiber artist and a homesteader in East Tennessee. We have a small flock of wool sheep, and we've been shearing them and processing the fiber and making fun things out of their wool for over ten years now. In this course, you're going to be learning several basic skills related to how to create things with wool. First, we're going to talk about how to select the right wool for your felting project. Second, we're going to be talking about how to acid dye wool roving. Next, I'll show you how to wet felt your roving into different shapes. And finally, we'll be putting together our garland and admiring our final product. This class is geared towards the excited beginner, meaning that you're ready to jump in there and learn some new skills and figure out how to do this. As with anything, the more you practice these skills, the better you'll get, and the better you'll be able to fine tune what you want to create with wool. So I hope you stay with me and join this class. It should be a lot of fun. Let's get going. 2. Project and Materials: Your project for this class is to create your own felted garland. You can pick whatever colors you want. You can pick whatever shapes you want, any size, any length you want. When you get done, make sure you upload a picture to the projects tab and let me have a look. I'm excited to see what you make. Let's talk about what you're going to need. First and foremost, you're going to need some wool. Today, we're starting with wool roving. Now if you are starting from a raw sheet fleece, please see my classes on how to wash raw wool and also how to card wool on a drum carter. That's can be really helpful to you before you get to this class. If you're just starting with roving, great, you're all set. Next, you are going to need a pot of some kind. This is my dedicated fiber dyeing pot. I only use this for dyeing, I do not put food in it. That brings me to dye. You're going to need some kind of acid dye. What does that mean? Today, I'm going to be using Dharma acid dyes, um I think they're great. You can find them online. But if you do not have this, you have a couple other options. Aid works really nicely as an acid dye. It has acid already in it, so it's great, ready to go. The other thing you could use is just plain old food coloring or Easter egg die will work for this. Again, if you are using something like Dharma dies, something that is not food safe, you're going to need a pot or you can also use a slow cooker for this, that you can just use dies in it and does not have food in it. If you're going to be using ku aid or food coloring, you can use your normal cooking equipment and you can use it with food afterward. No problem. To go along with that, we're going to need some white vinegar, plain old distilled white vinegar is fine. Next, we're going to need some soap. I like using castle soap in a bar form for this project. I think it's the easiest to control. Some filters swear by palm olive disp that can work too. Pretty much any soap will work, to be honest. You just want to avoid the soaps that have tons of bubbles because that's just going to be annoying in the filtering process. Castle soap tends to produce a little bit less lather, so it tends to work a little bit better for this project. Next, we're going to need a needle of some kind. Today, this is a weaving needle. It's actually a six inch weaving needle that actually came in it. For those of you who are familiar with a Zoom loom, it came with that. I find that this works really well for this project. But really, you can use any needle you want to. I'm going to be using a thin. This is 100% cotton string. You can use thread if you want to. I don't like using thread just because it is a little bit more prone to breaking. I like the stronger string material, especially if I want to keep my garland around for a long time. Especially with kiddos around, things get put through their paces and having something that's a little bit stronger tends to hold up better. You're also going to need access to a sink and some warm water. Let's get started. 3. How to Select Wool: Let's talk about what kind of wool you're going to be starting out with. To pick wool for your project, you're going to want something that is 100% wool, not something that has other fibers added into it. You don't want something that has polyester blended in with it or cotton blended in with it. Things like alpaca and llama will felt eventually, but you're going to have to work a lot harder. I'm going to recommend that you start out with something that is 100% wool. The other thing to keep in mind is you want to avoid anything that says super wash. Super wash wool is Franken wool. It's been treated with chlorine gas and has been dipped in a polymer, the parts of it normally felt don't felt. Super wash will not work for this project, do not use it. I'm also going to suggest that you use a lighter color wool. It doesn't necessarily have to be exactly white. You can use shades of gray too. You can get some really nice variations of color using gray wool as your dying material. Um, I would avoid using the really dark wool. You can use this for your felting and for your final balls, but do not use really dark wool obviously for your dying because you're not going to see the colors very well at all. But like I said, feel free to play around with those shades of wool that are kind of in between the grays and the browns. Sometimes you get really nice colors when you over dye those things. So be creative. I want to see what you come up with. 4. Acid Dyeing: All right, so I've got my die pot on the stove and I've just filled it with warm water from the tap, and I'm going to turn it on and bring it to a boil. So our water is boiling now. I'm just going to turn this off. And I'm going to add some white vinegar. Now the rule of thumb is about a fourth of a cup vinegar for a pound of wool. Now, I'm just going to be dying a couple ounces today, so I don't need quite that much. To be honest, I don't usually measure this. I just give it a generous glug. It's better to have a little bit more than you need than not enough. If you are using citric acid, the ratio is one tablespoon per pound of wool. If you're using lide, you do not need vinegar or citric acid because if you look on the back, first ingredient is citric acid. We got a built in acid for kola. If you're using regular food coloring, you will need vinegar. All right. So today, I'm going to be dyeing some red. This is fire engine red. And I'm going to use probably about a quarter of a teaspoon total. I'm gonna put that in our dye bath with the vinegar. I just stir it up. We want to get this really well dissolved, so we have a pretty uniform dye. It's foaming a little bit. That is good. We don't want any clumps or anything. Here. As far as temperature for dyeing goes, we want this just under boiling. I find if I heat my water to boiling, then add my vinegar and the dye and by the time I get the wool in there, it'll be the perfect. I have some roving. This is a Shetland cross roving here, whitish. I'm just going to gently put it in my die pot and I'm just going to press down to get it underneath the surface. Now remember we've selected fiber here for its felting abilities. We don't want to felt it before we're ready for it to be filtered. Just be very gentle in this part. You don't want to agitate it, just gently push down until everything is submerged. Looks pretty good. I'm just going to let this sit and come pretty close to room temperature. By that time, you can see already some of the colors coming out of the water here and the fiber is picking it up. All right, so we'll come back when this is nice and cool. All right. So this is cooled off now and you can see there's almost no dye left in the water. This is ready to go. This water has a little bit of vinegar in it, as you remember, we need to rinse the vinegar out of it. To do that, what I'm going to do is I'm going to fill up my sink with just some room temperature water and I'm going to transfer my wool into it and just gently let it soak. Again, we do not want to agitate this. I just lifted my wool out of my pot with my spoon. Just going to transfer it to the water. Again, just let it push down a little bit. Just let it soak for a minute. Now, if your wool is still a little bit warm, do not put it into cold water because that's going to shock the wool. Again, we don't want to filt it before we're ready for it to filt. So the goal of this is just to get rid of that extra vinegar wool, if you let it sitting in vinegar or leave vinegar on it for a long period of time, it's not real good for it. It will damage the wool. I'm going to just repeat this process. I've got my wool out of there. Now I'm going to fill up my sink again. Never let your faucet run on your wool because that's going to agitate it and you're going to get felt before you're ready. Okay. Just push it down again just a little bit. If I were dyeing yarn or if I were wanting to use this roving for something other than felting, I would either use a little bit of syntropol or a little bit of do soap in my rinse here just to get all of the extra extra dye. But because we're going to be felting and we're going to be using a bunch of soap on this, anyway, I'm not so concerned about it at this point. This point, I'm going to take it out of here and I'm just going to hang it up to dry. Hangers work nicely for this. Just going to hang that up. 5. Wet Felting: All right, so let's talk about how to wool felt your wool roving that you just dyed. Got these pretty colors. You're going to start by pulling off a piece off of your piece of roving. I recommend it starting with a piece about this size. I see that. As you're getting started, you may want to start with slightly larger pieces and then you can work your way down. But the slightly larger pieces are easier to handle as you're beginning to felt. I'm just going to start at one end and I'm just roll that end in. Now, once I get a bit going, I'm going to shift that about 90 degrees, doesn't have to be perfect. I'm just rolling it so the fibers are lining up in different directions. It's not just a single direction coil, it's a jumbled mess. When you're filtering, jumbled messes are good. There we go. We got a jumbled mess. Very fluffy. I'm just going to submerge this. This is warm water, just tap water that came out pretty much as hot as it can go. I'm going to dip it in there and get it wet. I'm going to get my hand wet and then I'm going to get a little bit of soap on my hand. From my bar. Like I said, you can do this with liquid soap too if you want to, and then I'm just going to start rolling it in a ball just like you would roll a ball of playdough. You can see it just beginning to come together. Now, as you're starting out, you just want to be very gentle at first. You don't want to push very hard at all. You just want to put just a tiny bit of pressure. As you feel the outside of that ball starting to form, you can use a little bit more force. You can see I'm getting a little bit more soap as I go. O. See that starting to come together there. We're just going to keep working it. Like I said, the more you work it, the more solid your ball is going to be. Now for the purposes of a garland, we don't need this to be super compact. If you're familiar with wet felting, if you keep going, you'll get a super solid ball and you can do that, but it's going to make your life a little bit harder as you go. If you need a little bit more liquid, you can do that. All right. That is looking pretty good. I'm just going to give a couple more rolls, a little bit more soap. If you find that you've gotten too much soap on your hand, you can rinse them off in the warm water and that helps reset. If you get too much soap on your hands when you're trying to do this, the ball will just slide around. I won't actually roll in the way you want it to, and then you won't get that spherical shape. You'll get a pancake instead, which is not what we're after. If you find that that's happening, rinse your hands off in the warm water and then reset. That should give you enough friction to where you can roll it in a sphere. All right. That is looking pretty good. I'm pretty happy with that. After this, I'm just going to rinse this under some cold water in the tap and set it aside to dry. We've talked about how to create a spherical ball shaped bead. Let's talk about how to create an oblong bead. I've got a piece of blue here, again, something about this size. But you can play with the sizes and do different variations as you want to. I'm going to start at one end like before. Just roll it a little bit and then shift it around so it's not just rolling from one direction. Ideally, you want your fibers at 90 degrees from each other, more or less. We got our roll here. Same thing. I'm going to dip this in my warm water, get some soap on my hand, get this going. Now I'm going to start out doing the same thing that I did with the spherical ball. I'm just going to roll it and create the beginnings of a sphere here. A little bit more. Again, put a little bit too much soap, so I'm going to get some water. It's less slippy slidy. Also, like I mentioned before, you don't want to soap that has tons of bubbles because that's going to make this part of the process more annoying. I've got the beginnings of a ball here. Instead of continuing to work on this ball, what I'm going to do is I'm going to pinch it like this and loosen it up. Now it's oval shaped, egg shaped, if you will. I'm going to keep going. But instead of doing like you would a Plato ball, I'm just going to roll it back and forth in my fingers. The process of the soap and the warm water helps open up the scales in the wool and helps them bind together. You see it's forming. It's not quite done yet, still If you see it, it's still fuzzy, keep going a little bit. All right. You can shift where in your palm you're rolling it if you find a Plato snake, pardon the Plato references. You want to shift it up and down to even it out because obviously you have bumps and grooves in your hands. You can do this on a surface also, but I find it's easier and less messy just do it in my hands. All right. See? That looks pretty good. I'm pretty happy with that. You have a little bit of a tuft on each end. I think that's all right. That's going to be partially hidden when we get the beads on the garland anyway, or you can continue to work it. You make your own artistic choices at this point. Again, I'm just going to rinse this under some cold water and let it dry. 6. Making Your Garland: All right, check out our beads. Aren't these pretty? I think they're pretty. Now we're going to need our needle. Like I said, this is a six inch weaving needle that I like to use for this project. You can use any kind of needle, but I find that this works the best. If you have access to something like that. I've got my string, and what I did is just tie a pretty good knot at one end of it. Like I said, I like to use string because it's thicker and heavier. I can get a pretty good knot at the end that'll stop the beads. If you're using just regular sewing thread, it's a little bit trickier to get a good knot at the end that's going to stop your beads, but it's doable. I'm going to thread my string on there. Get it on. You're going to pick a bead to start with, and you're just going to stick it through. Now, this is where it is helpful if you have not filtered your balls a super large amount because if you've just filtered them a little bit, you can see this ball is still a little bit squishy. It's not super hard. It's going to be much easier to pierce through these balls that are a little bit squishy than the ones that are super compact. We'll start here. I'm going to do a red white and blue. Scheme here since it's almost the fourth. Now, these long ones, I go from the end and go down to the tip, just like that. Pull it on. Keep going. This one is a little bit more compact. It takes a little bit more doing to get through it and you may find it's a little bit tricky. What you can do if that happens is just twist your needle back and forth and it'll make its way through eventually as long as your needle is sharp enough. That's another reason I like this particular needle is because it has a pretty nice point on the end. I do have a five inch weaving needle that I also use sometimes, but the point is not quite as poky at the end and it has a hard time getting through some of these balls. This one works really nicely. Again, I'm going to go through end to end. Another thing to keep in mind is that whether you want your beads just spaced right next to each other, or you can separate them a little bit separating them. Gives you a nice effect and it doesn't require quite as many beads. You can see that looks pretty cool. This works better on the thicker strings. If you're working with thread, this is not going to work quite as well to separate your beads like that, but it is a nice effect. You can also play around with different colored string. That's a neat variation also. I'm going to put mine together for our purposes here. I'm just going to keep going and I'll meet you back in just a minute. We got it all strung up. Got about five feet worth on this one. You can obviously make it however long you want to make it. But when I go to the end, what I like to do is to make a nice loop so that you can hang this up easily. I just double it over and tie a knot on this end, and tie another knot. You can do two or three depending on the weight of the string that you're working with. But that should be fine to stop that bead and also to give us a nice loop on this end. When we go to decorate, we have something to hang it from. All right. 7. Final Thoughts: Alright, there you have it. Now you know how to make your very own felted bead garland for any occasion. Don't forget to take a picture of your project and post it under the project's tab, so I can have a look and see what you've made. Also, if you have any questions or you run into any issues along the way, post a question, and I will get to it as soon as I can. Also, don't forget to leave a review for this class so others know what to expect, and it also helps my classes get noticed. So, take care. I'm so excited to see what you make with your new skills.