Wet Felted Jacket
In 2012 I attended Sandra Tredwell's felting workshop at the Australian Sewing Guild convention in Adelaide held at Immanuel Collage.
Materials
The felt is made from layers of wool and other fibres wet felted together to make a stable fabric.
The base is a prefelt of wool fibres known as needlefelt or wool batt, it is crafted from 19-20 micron Merino wool, grown and made in Australia, I purchased it from Fibre Fusion.
To this black pre-felt I added overlays of dyed silk chiffon strips, silk velvet and shaped wool tops.
The swirls of coloured wool tops are also from Fibre fusion. I pulled out a thickness of fibre from the hank and snapped it into a flat swirl.
The grey leaves are made also from wool tops.
When I went to Contexart Forum held in the Blue Mountains in April 2012 I bought a beautiful piece of black silk velvet with a large iris motif. I used the motif as a focal point for the back of the jacket.
Around the edge of the iris was a layer of silk georgette, by cutting out the iris and the georgette edge I was able to get the fibres of the wool to felt into the georgette and anchor the iris in place.
I also bought a couple of metres of a dyed silk chiffon. I ripped this into strips for the body of the jacket and I also added it to the edge of the fabric so it would hang off the jacket lower hem and sleeve cuffs.
prefelt layer with embellishments pinned on top
This is the felt after one cycle of felting. The wetted fibres are rolled between layers of plastic. The roll is tied up and put in a front loading washing machine. The tumbling action causes friction and the fibres to bond together.
At the left top corner of the picture you can see a pink stain, this is the dye from the chiffon which ran and coloured everything!
the felted fabric after several turns in the washing machine and pressed flat with the iron
The velvet iris motif felted and shrunk to a bubbled texture
the two sides of the felted sleeve piece
The velvet heart shapes felted into the black felbi perfectly but would not adhere to the purple felbi at all so I had to peel them off.
The back of the jacket has a feature of a velvet iris. The sheer georgette fabric that hangs from the ends of the sleeves and edges of the jacket was bought with a dyed purple wash, this fabric was not set very well when dyed and subsequently leaked dye all over the other fabrics, surfaces and towels used to felt the wool. The result of this dye releasing during the felting process caused the black and white wool leaves to take on a purple hue.
The seams were sewn overlaid and flat to allow the garment to be reversible.
Jacket front. Because the wool fabric shrinks during the felting process the chiffon on the edges has a ruffled look.